11 - Make a fast presence-absence matrix from a matrix with abundance values

So you have a large file of taxonomic assignments that you have imported into Excel from BLAST or the RDP Classifier. Lets assume you have made a pivot table summarizing the data into a form that you would like to analyze elsewhere like [R] or some other statistical program. You have copied and special-pasted those values into a fresh sheet in just the right format for the next program. You don't want to work with abundance data though so let's convert it quickly into a presence-absence matrix.

Select all the values in the matrix (excluding any header or row labels). Search for the wildcard character '*' and replace with '1' (without the quotes). Next, search for '' (nothing) and replace with '0'. Done. No VBA scripting or other tortuous manipulations necessary.