My quick fix for vertically stored data:
If each persons entry has a double space between, in word, use edit replace
to replace each end of paragraph with tabs, then replace each double tab with
a paragraph mark. Each persons data should now be in a single tab seperated
row.
Copy to excel add a couple or three columns between A and B and use text to
columns or the RIGHT function to divide names on spaces and in just a few
minutes you have a very easy to use table. If he wasn't consistent in the
order, etc, of the phone numbers, it could take a little more work to get
that part organized, but just having them by last name sounds like it would
be a big improvement!
Good luck.

"Markus" wrote:

Hi there everyone. A customer of mine recently sent me a word document full
of names and phone numbers. There is no unique and consistent method for how
he did this, and it is very disorganized. It also is not in alphabetical
order..

It's basically setup like this:

Joe Shmoe
123-123-1234
123-123-1235 office
123-123-1236 cell

etc..etc.. And there are hundreds of names in there.. I copied and pasted
the word document directly in to Excel..

It would seriously take hours if not days to reorganize this whole list in
to a proper list, so I'm wondering if there is a quick method for sorting all
this stuff in alphabetical order..

Now this might have been pointless on my part, but just for the heck of it,
I highlighted each individual name and the numbers that belong to that name,
and put them in it's very own table.. So there's basically like 300-400
tables going vertically in one column.. The person's name is actually the
header of each table..

Is there any way to sort those tables? If I can't use Excel to sort tables,
does anyone know of another way to go about doing it?

Thanks for your help.. Sorry for the ridiculousness..