Just as if it were a regular toolbox full of useful yet sometimes not necessarily interconnected gadgets, XL-Tools is an open-source software toolbox that gathers a wide variety of small and not-so-small utilities aimed at making your life a bit easier. It includes routines to manipulate text strings, to sort data in various ways, to convert between text-based codes, to operate with times and dates, and an extra pocket of other “utils” for a number of miscellaneous tasks.
The program’s interface is not extremely sophisticated – it consists of two (sometimes three) panels where you input the text or the files you want to work with (left panel) and where you can see the results or the location of a temp.txt file with the results (right panel). Above the panels, you’ll find five tabs, each of them devoted to a theme that glues in some way the tools included in that category. All tools work with textual information, which you can copy and paste, type, or load as a file.
None of the tools brought together in this software package may carry enough weight to become a standalone application, but all of them are truly useful in their own right. They perform tasks that, simple as they may look, will keep you away from time-consuming and/or tediously repetitive tasks. The best examples are found in the Lists tab, where you’ll come across simple utilities to select or remove duplicate items from lists, to count or characters, to move data from a column to a row and vice versa, to merge lines, or to transliterate, reverse, replace, or split a text string. more
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