Hi Steven,
The advantage of a macro is ease of use, and not having
to maintain an original column and the column you want.
If you have lastnames comprised of more than one word
and you want ease of use you will have to use a macro.

No matter what you do, it always comes down to knowing
your own data, and of course the results you want, like that
asterisk.


"Steven Deng" wrote in message news:TjRhd.96840$nl.33207@pd7tw3no...
Thank you david,

Actually, I wrote a macro and solved that problem a couple days ago using
functions like (strconv, split, & ...etc). A friend told me that someone
showed just combining these function in some order and then solved the
problem within one line of code (which can be applied without invoking
macros)

The reason I post this is to that i want to see how elegant that solution
can be.

Sincerely,
Steven Deng.