code for IPC reclassification in 35 classes

In some previous posts I made available some code about ISI-OST-INPI IPC reclassification in 30 classes.

Recently, in order to have a better balance of the number of patents contained in the different classes, it has been proposed a 35 classes reclassification.

At this link can be consulted the ufficial document from Ulric Schmoch, published from WIPO.

So I made, in order to give am easier format, an excel file containing descriptions in one sheet and IPCs (in the second sheet); the file can be downloaded from this link.
Care the reclassifications sheet contains a colums IPCNOT showing that, if the patent contains such IPCs should be discarded from the class, regardless other IPCs should belong to it.

Differently from ISI-OST-INPI, this reclassification should be run on ALL IPCs (main and secundary).
As the author correctly adresses, this will lead to a 20% of patents belonging to 2 or more classes and for such cases only the main IPC (if available) should be used for reclassifications.
Have fun!!!

Underscore vs dash in excel sheet names

this could be funny, if it were not a big issue in the elaboration of a questionnaire.
As I previously mentioned I'm working on building a DB for DG-Infso (EU) from some thousands of answers made by project leaders, collected via Excel.
The bad thing was that apparently many people had changed some of the worksheets, changing dashes (-) to underscores (_) (that was like publications-papers becoming publications_papers).

Even if I understand that for somebody's taste underscore may look nicer than a sign that resemble a minus (so attracting negativity) I did not feel like dozens of people would be taking the effort of manual substitutions just to avoid bad karma.

So I suspected "maybe they are mac users?" (you know mac users are more estetic-oriented...) until I found this post on OPENOFFICE.ORG explaining how openoffice calc changes dashes to underscore in worksheets names.

So cool...

Excel vs in cell line breaks

Recently, working on a EU Tender (Using performance indicators in monitoring the implementation of ICT research in FP6 and FP7) I had to transform into a DB a batch of reports (reporting publication titles, magazine and so on) whose original format was MS excel (may the hell swallow them!!!).
One (out of dozens) of the problems was that many cells were containing a line break (due to web cut & paste or in order to give 'em a pretty look) and I found a quick solution for removing them all from a given worksheet

STEP 1 select the area for substitution
STEP 2 press ALT+F11 (opens VB window)
STEP 3 press CTRL+G (opens IMMEDIATE frame)
STEP 4 paste the following: selection.replace chr(10)," " and press enter in the IMMEDIATE frame

Obviously sobstituting chr(10) or " " it works with anything you need to replace.
As a matter of fact I had also to replace doublespaces...!!!

STEP 5 selection.replace "  "," "