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Are you having trouble dealing with the  “Time” column in the CSV file that you exported from an Agilent logic analyzer?  Even with gigabytes of data, the batch file below corrects all the times in a few seconds.  Pun not intended.  The corrected file will have all those original times in seconds, as just a number, with the engineering units removed.  The “Times” header will change to “Seconds”.   The data in the other columns is not changed.

Agilent Technologies was spun off from the Hewlett Packard Company in 1999.  The division that makes logic analyzers was spun off from Agilent Technologies and became Keysight Technologies in 2014.

Files with a CSV extension are comma-separated value database files.

The  “Time” column in those CSV files is originally formatted with engineering units in seconds, milliseconds, microseconds and nanoseconds.  Some examples of those times are

-8.388608 ms

-999.446 us

-374 ns

0 s

626 ns

999.344 us

830.453038 ms

9.876543210 s

Spreadsheet applications cannot deal with these to do time math, sort  by time, plot graphs, etc.  Here is the latest fix, updated on 2015/6/12:

InSeconds

How to use the batch file link above

1. First, click on, copy and paste the text of the text file above into an empty  text-editor window such as Notepad.
2. Save that text by the name “InSeconds.bat” into the folder containing your CSV files.  You could optionally save it into the Binary Filters’ SR folder.
3. After that, you need to use this link to install the Binary Filters on your computer.
4. Close any Command Prompt windows that you had opened prior to the installation in step 3.
5. Now, open a fresh Command Prompt window (aka CMD or COMMAND) to activate the new path to those binary filters.
6. Use the CD command to Change the active Directory to the folder with your CSV files.
7. Type the command “InSeconds FileName.CSV”, changing FileName to the name of your CSV file.
8. Type “EXIT” when you are done using the Command Prompt window.

The Result

Your directory will now have a new file named “InSeconds.csv“.  Rename it before running the batch file again.

InSeconds.csv can now be sorted by time as a spreadsheet or as text, plus time math became possible.  All times will include a decimal-point followed by 9 digits.  Spreadsheet programs will recognize all times as floating-point numbers.

Known Limitations

• The “Time” must be the first column of data.
• Time engineering units must use all lower-case.
• Non-zero picoseconds are not handled.
• The input file may not be named tmp.csv.

– Gareth B. Dolby

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