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I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | L I T I G A T I O N A N D P R A C T I C E S U P P O R T 15 TEXT EDITORS Creating or manipulating load files? Use a text editor like Notepad ++ or UltraEdit. Avoid opening load files in Excel as much as possible. If you can work with your load files in a text editor, you have less risk of changing date formats, etc. A text editor is a piece of software used to manipulate and change text files. The software is very versatile and can do a number of different things so we're only scratching the surface here. The typical use(s) of a text editor is to change file paths in log files, change the technical format of loadfiles and log files (ANSI or DOS), as well as a number of other advanced skillsets. Text files are simple files with a large variety of uses in legal software – example, they can be the dataload for database coding, a transcript, log file that contains pathing information for images. In other words, it is used to load and import information into databases and typically have a file extension of .TXT, but also can have a number of different file extensions (The 3 letter extension at the end of the file like DOC for Word and XLS for Excel) to show the application it is associated with. The extension can be changed to any format and opened in virtually any text editor. The advantage to using something like Ultra Edit/Notepad++ over the Windows included Notepad is performance and capability. Notepad crashes on larger files while Ultraedit/Notepad++ are just getting warmed up. - Shannon Lex Bales, The Trial Presentation Companion, A Step-by-Step Guide to Presenting Electronic Evidence in the Courtroom Both UltraEdit and Notepad++ allow you to create macros (recordings of operations that can be automatically repeated so you don' t need to do them manually). For example, you have several documents containing a list of emails addresses, each one separated with a line break. You'd like to change this, so each email address is separated with a semi- colon and you'd like to copy the results ready to paste into another file. For this example, you can record the steps for the first item, and have the macro do it automatically for the rest of the document or even in another document if the macro is saved. To create a macro for this scenario, the Macro Record tool in UltraEdit was used to automatically record each of the individual steps required to perform the task (the results from this task were copied after the replace operation to be ready to paste into another document) and the macro was created: The macro is then run in the remaining files making a repetitive task a breeze. One favorite feature of UltraEdit is the ability to edit columns in a load file. Using Column mode transforms a flat file into something you can easily edit by column. Notice the bird's eye view of the entire file in the right sidebar. This helps get a sense of the entire data in the file compared to the portion on the active window:

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