Hi Jeff,
See http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/join.htm#septerm
make sure that the column to the right is empty and the words
after the first word will be moved to the next column.
If you have names like "van Buren" then change all "van " to "van$"
and change the $ signs back to spaces afterwards.
--
HTH,
David McRitchie, Microsoft MVP -- Excel
My Excel Pages: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/excel.htm


"Jeff" wrote in message ...
Hi

I'm working in 2002 and have a spreadsheet with several columns. One of
the columns has text consisting of a surname and several other names
after each entry. That is each field (or line) in that column contains
several words. I need to delete the first word (happens to be the
surname) in each field in that column. Because a dealing with several
thousand records, I would obviously like to create a macro to do this,
one line at a time. I attempted to create this macro with the "record a
macro" function. But it has not worked for me. The macro I produced
just pastes the same end result (from the first field) in every field I
run it.

Example:
Changing "Smith John Andrew" to "John Andrew"
Changing "Henderson Frank: to "Frank"
etc.

Basically, once I am in a field in that column, I want the macro to do
its thing, I would like it to:

F2 (to edit the field)
Home (to go to the beginning of the text words)
Shift-Ctrl-Right arrow (to select the first word)
Delete (to delete that selected first word)
Enter (to accept the result ad move to the next field below it).

I have been unsuccessful in creating that macro - or at least it does
not work correctly when recorded and just pastes the results of the
first field I created the macro in. Is it possible to create such a
macro? I do not know Visual basic and therefore cannot write it from
scratch, assuming it was possible to do so.

Can someone help? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Jeff