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I've been using Trados from version 6.5 (parallel port dongle!) and now use SDL Studio 2019. Over the years I have found a few strange uses (the ones that get friends who use SDL Studio giving me a funny look when I mention my "hack" having a beer) although in the cold light of day they have often come back to me and said, that crazy as my suggestion sounded in the bar, it might actually work and be useful. Does anyone else have similar uses?
One such example is one I call "Monolingual SDL Studio in Excel". We get a lot of questionnaires to fill out in Excel where the answers are as narrative texts (think word-processing in Excel...) which I receive for editing / language check. Since the questionnaires are usually from the same sources (international organisations), their format is standardised. I have a little Excel Macro that recolours all their questions cells (ie. to then allow me to ignore those cells) and then only the output that I want to edit is shown in SDL Studio. I have a project definition set up, only for editting Excel files, and the empty TM I have is either in German (German (Liechtenstein)-German (Germany)) or English (in SDL Studio 2019 I use English(Europe) - English(UK)) and then set up the project. Where it also works well is when the same answer is given to multiple questions in ensuring consistency. At the end of it, I export the target file and use another Excel Macro to change the recoloured cells back.
