I receive monthly volume reports from my distributors with data arranged by
each of their customers. They arrive formatted in Excel 2003 or better that
has been generated from their ERP platform. The problem is they are not
easily sortable because of the layout: The first row for each customer
contains account information as a single text string including #, name,
address, etc in Col. A. Succeeding rows are by product but with separate
cells for item #, description, and quantity sold. The pattern then repeats
itself with each additional customer and the number of rows per customer
varies. I need to sort and subtotal by selected product criteria under each
customer because they arent that way as delivered.

To facilitate re-sorting, so I can categorize by product criteria, I want to
put the customer # in a new Col A. and the name in a new Col. B for each
product like in a flatfile DB or table. I imagine inserting a new Col. A and
B and then writing an extraction formula in each to parse the parts of the
text string I want and insert them at the beginning of each row that has
product data. It would need to be a conditional €˜=IF formula based on
whether the prior row has a text string greater than the six characters of
the customer number.
Got any ideas?