nope, i think he means that "M1;M3;L02;L03;L08" is all in a2 or whatever
row. tom's procedure seems to work nicely

--


Gary


"Bryan Hessey"
wrote in message
news:Bryan.Hessey.1wz5ma_1129431903.3567@excelforu m-nospam.com...

Hopefully you mean that your data is all within column A such that A1 is
a heading, and A2=M1, A3=M3, A4=L02, A5=L03, A6=L08 etc

Assuming that columns B and C are free, in B2 put
=if(left(A2,1)="M",A2,"")
and in C2 put either
=if(B2="",A2,"")
or
=if(left(A2,1)="L",A2,"")

formula-copy B2 and C2 to the end of your data in column A, this
should show the required split, then

highlilght columns B & C and COPY, then Paste Special, Values (back
over themselves)

You can then delete column A and adjust the headings.


thebside Wrote:
Ok, I have a database that I am working on and in it there happens to be
fields that have data in them that belong to two separate survey
questions. I need to parse it so that the data in goes into the two
separate columns.

The data in the single column looks like this;
Column 1 (What is your Job Title) Column 2 (What is your language
Preference)
Answer sets that start with "M" belong to Column 1, and answer sets
that start with "L" belong to Column 2.
In the single column that I Have now, the answers look like this
"M1;M3;L02;L03;L08"

Is it even possible to separate out the data into two columns?


--
Bryan Hessey
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