![]() ![]() This is true in less obvious cases, such as Lowes vs. Essentially, be sure to examine all of the companies in your list with a keen eye for any and all possible variations that people may use, even if they are quite wrong in doing so, as you cannot find what you don’t search for. Morgan Chase & Co.” on the Fortune 500 list, people are more likely to enter it as JPMC, or JPMorganChase, JP Morgan Chase, etc. LinkedIn is a fantastic source of industry and company information – here’s a short video clip of how you can build industry-specific company lists using LinkedIn and one of the above Excel OR builders:Ĭleansing and Improving your Company StringsĮnsure your data is clean by using Notepad to strip unwanted formatting before copying into Excel to build your OR strings, paying attention to lookout for hidden spaces.Īdditionally, look over your list to identify opportunities to improve your string by adding variations of the company names that people are likely to use (abbreviations, adding/removing spaces between two or more names, etc.).įor example, although the company is listed as “J.P. Using LinkedIn to Build Company/Industry Boolean OR Strings I’ve had a few instances of trying to build OR strings from Notepad and an extra space was hiding at the end of every company name after pasting into Excel (e.g., “Lockheed Martin “), which ruined the integrity of the string. When copying and pasting lists from Notepad to Excel, it is safest to be sure to right-click, select “Paste Special” and then select Text. However, when copying and pasting from various websites, you may pick up some unwanted and unseen garbage formatting, even if you copy to Notepad first before entering the list into Excel. If you’re searching for Fortune 500 companies, you could of course go straight to the source. There are many sites you can use to find lists of target companies by size and by industry. Here’s a quick video clip of how to use it: Once you download the file, you should notice this warning:īe sure to “Enable Content,” otherwise the macros won’t work. Now, I’ve never used VBA, but I am a bit of a hacker (as much as a non-technical person can be) and I managed to get it working. Knowing that I could not possibly be the only person annoyed by this lack of simple functionality, some quick Internet searching led me to a few sites that claimed you actually could concatenate a range of cells, and one site showed how to do it with a VBA function. ![]() Then again, maybe this functionality exists and I just haven’t found it yet? ![]() I’m using Excel 2010, and I’m still dumbfounded that you can’t concatenate a range of cells with text values – it seems like something you should be able to accomplish with a click of a button much as you can with AutoSum. Here’s a quick video clip of how to use it.ĭuring my research into how to use Excel to accomplish what I wanted to do, I found out that while it’s easy to add/combine a range of numbers together in Excel (e.g., A1:A100), you can’t concatenate a range of text cells without manually specifying all of the cells in the range (e.g., A1&A2&A3…). If you’re not handy with Excel and would like a turn-key solution, I’ve saved you the effort of trying to build it yourself – you can download a basic Excel Boolean OR builder here: I am not an Excel wizard by any means, so it may have taken me longer than most to take John’s Excel advice and get it to work. Thankfully, John Turnberg graciously commented on my article (thank you John!) and detailed how to use Excel to make quick work of creating large OR strings. In that post, I demonstrated that when accessing LinkedIn with a free account, there are no search string length limits, allowing you to enter long OR statements with 100’s of companies.īuilding large OR strings can be very tedious and time consuming work. I wrote an article not too long ago in which I illustrated some of the serious limitations associated with using industry filters when searching LinkedIn (or any site, for that matter) for people with specific industry experience. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |