Does anyone have any secrets for making a huge list of shortcuts? This is what I mean -- I need to expand my blood pressure entries (among other vitals and laboratory values) because I get a lot "weird" entries -- blood pressure 90/40, et cetera. I need to add in all blood pressures systolic 90-100 and 40-60 diastolic of ALL of them I already I have (that I swiped from here). I started to do this the other day, and then I realized what a huge project it is!!

I started out with bp10050=blood pressure 100/50 and copied it about 100 times. Just working on the expansion, I went through and manually changed each increasing diastolic number. Then I went in and copied and replaced the systolic number for each group of ten, so I ended up with something like this:
bp10050=blood pressure 110/50
bp10050=blood pressure 110/51
bp10050=blood pressure 110/52
bp10050=blood pressure 110/53
bp10050=blood pressure 110/54
bp10050=blood pressure 110/55
bp10050=blood pressure 110/56
bp10050=blood pressure 110/57
bp10050=blood pressure 110/58
bp10050=blood pressure 110/59

Then, working on the short, I manually had to change each number group to match the expansion.

Is there a way to make this faster? I'm afraid if I have to do all of this manually, I will lose interest and it will never get done. And so far I've only started with adding the diastolic 50-60! I shudder to think how long it will take when I start adding systolic 90-100.

Shipaddict,
Excel is great for just this sort of thing! Are you familiar with the drag and fill feature of Excel? You can make a spreadsheet with your entries, where the numeric values are in a cell of their own. Then just "grab" the lower right corner of the cell and drag it down, and Excel increments the value by one.
I use this for a lot of numeric-type things!

-sono_io

you are so awesome sono!! no didn't know about this feature. I am pretty illiterate in excel. one of these days I'm gonna get a book on it.

This will definitely make my list go a little faster!

I too cannot use Excel, but for my BP list I used bp120/8_, bp121/8_ bp122/8_ and just type in the last number. This will decrease your "shorts" by 9/10. (if i did my math right!)

My list may be somewhere WAY back on this forum. I cannot look just now but you might be able to search for it.

HTH.

Lori

I hope you find it as useful as I do! It works great for creating entries with patient ages, temperatures, measurements, all sorts of numeric entries. There are lots of Excel tutorials and tips online, and we have a forum here that has some good info.

-sono_io