Clipboard pipelines: automate text formatting for SAP

A "pipeline" is a chain of rules applied to whatever you've copied, triggered by a shortcut. You copy raw data, you press, and it comes out clean and ready to paste into SAP. Here's the concept, the list of transformations, and ready-to-use recipes.

What is it, concretely?

Instead of opening Excel to tweak a list, you define once a chain of small steps (extract, clean, sort, format…), bind it to a keyboard shortcut, and apply it to the clipboard on demand. The transformed result replaces what you copied, ready to paste, wherever you are (SAP, Excel, an email).

Available transformations

• Extract numbers (codes, EANs) while ignoring junk text, with a minimum length.
• Remove duplicates.
• Split into a column a list written on a single line (one value per line).
• Sort (A→Z), UPPERCASE / lowercase, trim spaces, remove empty lines.
• Pad with zeros (see MATNR padding).
• Prefix / suffix each line, wrap in quotes, join with a separator (ideal for an SQL list 'a','b','c').
• Convert dates (DD.MM.YYYY ↔ YYYYMMDD) and numbers FR ↔ US (comma ↔ dot).
• Clean an SE16N export (remove the vertical bars and separator lines).
• Output keystroke: send a key after pasting, e.g. Shift+F12 to trigger the "Upload from Clipboard" of a SAP multiple selection.

Ready-to-use recipes

Combine with OCR and shortcuts

The real power is the end-to-end chain: a screenshot run through OCR → a pipeline that cleans it → an automatic paste into an SE16 multiple selection. All triggered by one or two shortcuts, where it used to take several minutes of manual typing. See also SAP GUI shortcuts to open the right transaction in the right place.

Frequently asked questions