man-man Posted:

I knew I’d learned something useful from making my useless replication of the ‘moar files sortable by attribute’ page (didn’t know it existed before I made my own), namely how to manipulate large wiki-formatted tables by combination use of spreadsheets and text editors.

To make sure everything was sorted into order my process was to dump it all into a spreadsheet, write a lookup formula and duplicate it (and slightly modified versions thereof) onto 4 columns and several hundred lines to get everything in place – one table row at a time.

Copy that to notepad and back to remove the formulaic part and just keep the text, so it could then be sorted by one column. To get it back onto individual rows I copied it from the spreadsheet to Word (which replaces column breaks with tabs) then did Find+Replace to put in a newline for each tab, putting everything back onto individual lines like the wiki likes it.

I maintain that this was far easier than going through by hand. YMMV

Genius. I went through looking at the dropdown list one by one, reordering/renaming the avatars. Sometimes the new names made some out of order, so I copied the image location from the dropdown’s preview, searched for it in the article, then renamed and moved the entire code to its correct place.