Perfect! That's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for the help.

"Gary''s Student" wrote:

Select a column and run this macro:

Sub JonInCanby()
For Each r In Selection
v = r.Value
If IsEmpty(v) Then
Else
r.Value = "_" & v
End If
Next
End Sub

It will apply the prefix in one swell foop!
--
Gary''s Student - gsnu200782


"Jon in Canby Or." wrote:

That's helpful but I was hoping for something more automated. I should've
written that I have a lot of worksheets and a lot of columns to do this on.
This solution would still be fairly labor intensive and prone to errors or my
part.

Does anybody have a more automated method?

Cheers

"Gary''s Student" wrote:

Use a helper column:

Say your data is in column A. In B1 enter:

="_" & A1
and copy down. Then copy column B and paste/special/values back onto column
A.
--
Gary''s Student - gsnu200781


"Jon in Canby Or." wrote:

Sorry if this is really easy or not possible. I'm a dba with very little
Excel experience. I've been given an Excel spreadsheet to import into a
relational database there are some data consistency issues...

Anyway, what I'd like to do is insert an underscore at the front of the data
in each cell in a column - preferably in only those cells that have data. So
if the cell has ABCDEF in it it'd become _ABCDEF .

Any clues on how to accomplish this? Thanks.