View Single Post
  #1   Report Post  
Posted to microsoft.public.excel.misc
Colin Foster Colin Foster is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 25
Default Searching for case specific data

Hi,
I've been given aan Excel spreadsheet to "sort out"!

In simple terms it's just a series of names, addresses & postcodes...
HOWEVER, rather than use one column for address line #1, a second for Address
line #2, & others for Post Town, County & Post Code, they've been mixed up!

So, what I'd like to do is find a nice simple way of working through these
2000+ records & pull out the relevant data. As a start, I want to pull the
Postcodes into a single column & I had originally thought of looking for a
part of a text string of 3 characters using LEFT & Spaces, however, some
postcodes are 4 characters for the first part & some counties have 4
characters followed by a space (e.g. West Yorkshire).

So, I then thought... "ok... let's look for words that start with a capital
letter followed by lower case" This will give me place names, rather than
post codes, but it will help point the way... and that's where I came
unstuck!! I can use PROPER, UPPER & LOWER to convert one to the other, but is
there a way of searching for these? so that I can pull out all of the
"non-postcode" lines?

Alternatively, is there a different approach that could be suggested?

Regards
Colin