Our secretary received a Word document which was written in wrong codepage, so we needed a quick conversion. Luckily, it was just plain text, no formatting. We recently reinstalled most of the stuff, so the conversion macros weren't around, and, besides, they have to rely on search&replace, and they are way down slow. I remember when I was writing them, that I was amazed by VBA's lack of elementary string functions like StrTran(), ChrTran(), and the goodies from FoxTools.

What did I do? Ctrl+a, Ctrl+C, run VFP, _cliptext=chrtran(_cliptext, first_table, second_table), back to Word, ctrl+V. Fifteen seconds, ten of which it took me to remember I'd better use VFP.