appending phone listings with open office

Just keeping a note of the process here as I’ll need to do it again and it’s been a bit of a faff.

I had two csv listings of phone numbers – I needed to find the duplicates that were already in the system and only upload the new ones. Sounds simple right?

First I needed to add the national dialing code to one of the lists to make it the same format as the other.
so in a new column I used the standard concarcenate code

=CONCATENATE("prefix";A1;"suffix")

Then I needed to put both lists in together – this was a problem because of a stupid hidden apostrophe in one of the lists – couldn’t get it to turn off with the format tools ended up pasting the phone list from both sheets into a text file and then copying the again so that it was pure text.

Then there is a filter mechanism built into open office but it turned out not to be as effective as this other formula.

So I had the phone numbers in column A – identically formatted and the source “old” or “new” written beside them in column B so I knew which list I’d got them from.

Then in column C I used the following formula and dragged it right down the page.

=IF(COUNTIF($A$1:$A$9999;A1)>1;"Duplicate";"")

then I was able to identify duplication and delete them so that I have a new list that only has new phone numbers.

Now to figure out how to import them into the phone….

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