Steve, thank you very much! The result wasn't perfect, but it's so darn
close. I'm thrilled!

Other than hands-on training, how can I accelerate my learning of MS Office
products like Word and Excel? I can get around them good enough to be
productive, but I'd love to have a more in-depth understanding of some of
their more advanced and powerful features. Input appreciated.

Thanks again.

JM












"Steve Yandl" wrote in message
...
JM,

Are you fairly sure that the emplyee used two or more spaces between each
entry in a row? Are you also confident that there are only single spaces
between characters within a field (for example, he/she didn't put two
spaces between the state abbreviation and zip code in the address field)?
If so, here is one possible option.

Make a backup copy of the Word document before the experiment!

Open the Word document and either press Ctrl plus the letter "h" or click
Edit Replace

In the replace window, click the "More" button and put a check next to
"Use wildcards"

In the "Find What:" box, type in
[ ]{2,}
note, that is square brackets with a single space between, followed
immediately by curly braces around the number two and a comma.
In the "Replace With:" box, type in
^t
Now, click the "Replace All" button. Every instance where Word finds two
or more spaces in sequence will be replaced by a single tab character.
I'd probably select all the text, click the 'Table' drop down menu and
choose to convert text to a table. This way you can easily check for any
odd results and correct before moving from Word and then do a simple copy
paste to move the table data into Excel.

Steve

"JM" wrote in message
...
I'm novice level with Word and Excel, so excuse what may be a basic
question/problem that I've got.

I asked an employee to enter lots of data into Excel. The data is
company name, address, contact name, and phone number. I requested that
each type of data be entered into different columns. Instead, the
employee used MS Word 2003. To compound the issue, the employee did not
use commas, tabs, or any other delimiter or formatting method that might
allow me easily to get the data over into Excel (by *easily* I mean using
a technique that I know ; ) The data in Word simply is separated by
random numbers of spaces. Nothing lines up, either, so I can't use the
manual column markers in Excel's Open As wizard.

What are my options for getting the data into Excel with the 4 categories
in separate columns? There are several hundred rows of data.

Thank you,

JM