Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire I need a databasing wizard

The problem here is that some names are first/last and others are last/first with no commas. I don't know of any excel function that can sort those out. Also, if you get records with a middle name, too, that's even tougher.

You need an application that reformats and fixes your mailing list. TCL or C.

The output should be a .csv file with one line per address.

Then use Word and the mailing list to generate the letters and envelopes.

sample Sent.

P.

I'm not saying this is the best way nor do I proclaim to be an excel guru. Matter of fact, people at work have claimed I do things the long way in excel more than once.

but my example would be taking it out of excel and into notepad

so now you have

Tom Smith
Jones Tom

then you copy that back into Excel using the special past or you replace blanks with blanks and a comma - either way

now you have each name isolated in a cell
Tom | Smith
Jones | Tom

and you can manipulate each column/cell. You're right though, there isn't going to be a macro that knows that Jones is a last name

But at least you can sort, filter (data->filter) and manipulate it. Just make a backup copy before you do any major action. Alot of times when I'm working with files I save a V1, V2, etc so if I totally screw it up I can go back to a version without losing my progress.

You can do it in Excel you don't need to move it to wordpad. Left, Right, Mid are all available to manipulate strings in excel fields.You may need to take a couple of passes at the most complex columns of data. You are just doing a simple data normalization it is not rocket science.

SRM did you get this figured out? If not I can help.

Can Excel look at Bill Jones and know which name is the 1st or last?

Thanks for all the repies and help. Persian Dog has been working with me on this and he seems to be making great progress on it. I'll let everyone know if I need more help.

Thanks,
Larry

Rock Chuck,

That is why I said the complex columns may need a couple of passes. Fix the obvious and get it down to the ambiguous first and lasts and you can do it. Excel has the same type of string manipulations as most scripting languages and even more power if you understand a little VBA. There is a website called Mr.Excel that has a forum where you can find some amazing things people have done in Excel.

http://www.mrexcel.com/

Mack

First, learn the difference between a spreadsheet and a database. Decide what you need to do, and then start asking questions. Good Luck--

A spreadsheet can be a database, but far more often it's simply a data reporting/processing tool. I use Excel a lot, pivot tables and charts are a very useful thing (pivot tables for me, charts for management because they do best with pretty colors and lines).

Access, MySQL, Oracle, SQLServer, Hadoop, etc. - those are databases in the more proper use of phrase. Specializing in storage of data and ability to query and return data fast.

Unfortunately I'm far from an expert on Excel, I know the tricks that I need to do my work but that's about 1% of Excel's capabilities.

Good luck.