It gets worse. There are sometimes blank spaces in front of these strings
of text and they need to be copied as is into column B.


"Sally" wrote in message
...
PLEASE save me 8,000 hours of manual work. I know one of you can figure
this
out - I sure can't. Thanks for looking.
I don't know vba at all so if you want me to use it please be specific
about
what to type where.

I have a million rows with data in column A that looks like this
(including
the brackets):

<aaaaaa<bbbbbb
<cccccc111111111111
<ddddddddddddd

And I need column be to copy with additional text like this
<aaaaaa<write:(aaaaaa)<bbbbbb<write:(bbbbbb)
<cccccc<write:(cccccc)111111111111<write:1111111 11111
<ddddddddddddd<write:(ddddddddddddd)

Basically, for every string surrounded by <,
put the following in column B
copy the string surrounded by < but change the < to ()
add "<write:" in front of the string that starts with (
put a after the )

for any strings in column A with no < around it
copy the string and
add "write:" in front of it
put a after it

There can be more than on string with or without < in column A
If there is, everything in Column A needs to be in column B following the
rules above.