Neil Allen said:

the fact that they are all in one long segment

Please elaborate on this... I don't understand what you mean here.
Multiple sentences in a single Excel cell should be normally segmented to multiple segments...

Neil Allen said:

so that I don't have to keep making this change every time I create a memory for a document

Why would you create separate TM each time?!?! Simply create a TM with appropriate segmentation rules, which will be used for segmentation only (i.e. put it as a first TM in the list) and NOT for the update (turn off the appropriate check box)... and use another TM for updating only.
EDIT: Ah, Nora wrote the same thing in the meantime ;-)

But I still don't understand the first part... if the sentences within a cell are properly punctuated, they should be correctly segmented.
Or are you maybe talking about cases like "bullet lists" where individual list items do not contain punctuation?

Ok, thank you Nora and Paul for your quick replies. The solution you mention, Nora, suits me perfectly.

Evzen, the default segmentation rules do not include the soft line break. I occasionally receive Excel files where dozens of lines containing hundreds of words are placed in a single Excel cell, which then gets imported as a single large segment.

Thank you for your answer.

Neil

Neil Allen said:

Evzen, the default segmentation rules do not include the soft line break. I occasionally receive Excel files where dozens of lines containing hundreds of words are placed in a single Excel cell, which then gets imported as a single large segment.

Yes, I know that line feed is not included in default segmentation rules.
My point was that this rule is not necessary if sentences are properly punctuated in the first place and if the source file is parsed by a correct file type.

It sounds to me like that you are using the Bilingual Excel file type (which AFAIK does NOT perform sentence segmentation within a cell... which results in multiple sentences in a single segment) instead of the standard Excel file type.

A screenshot of such Excel file would be worth a thousand words...

"this rule is not necessary if sentences are properly punctuated in the first place"

Well obviously not, Evzen. But surely it is also obvious that many files received from clients are not properly punctuated or authored in an optimised manner and neither do I wish to waste time correcting them.

I am not interested in getting into a philosophical discussion about this as I have work to do and the problem is now resolved.

Neil

right

"get things done".. that is the only thing to remember..

now I am confronting this kind of stupid case.. It is  very nice..

It's not philosophical discussion, it's about doing the work effectively and fast, without extra unneeded effort.
But it's your choice how you do things. I prefer not to waste time by unnecessary work.

So you would correct hundreds of badly formatted files instead of changing a segmentation rule?

you had an (the best) answer, already, I guess.

Yes. Time to bring this conversation to a close.

Thank you to all who participated.

Neil

I haven't seen your files, so can't say for sure, but... yes, maybe I would, sort of...

I already mentioned elsewhere that I prefer to use scripts which export texts from Excel to simple XML, which is than stuffed to Studio for translation... and the content of target XML is then injected by a script back into appropriate positions in the original Excel.

This method automatically - because of the XML format - takes care of things like HTML code inside the texts, accented and other characters as HTML entities instead of actual characters, etc.
In other words, this process kind of prevents me from having to handle various issues, seamlessly...

I haven't seen your files, so can't say for sure, but... yes, maybe I would, sort of...

I already mentioned elsewhere that I prefer to use scripts which export texts from Excel to simple XML, which is than stuffed to Studio for translation... and the content of target XML is then injected by a script back into appropriate positions in the original Excel.

This method automatically - because of the XML format - takes care of things like HTML code inside the texts, accented and other characters as HTML entities instead of actual characters, etc.
In other words, this process kind of prevents me from having to handle various issues, seamlessly...