sounds like almost impossible

my usual approach to these problems is to import the name as one (initials
and surname) and then use a formula in a helper column to extract the
initials/surname. An excel formula gives you much more flexibility in
splitting the field than the import function does.

regards,
Tieske

"bollard" wrote in message
...
Hello

A colleague receives, periodically, a text file. It is a huge one. It
contains name details, then a series of numerical data.

They need to convert this into an excel document, but the first obstacle
concerns the names.

The first entry, of course, is the title, followed by initials. The
problem
is, the number of initials can vary from none to 4 or more.

How can we export the Text file into Excel, so that the surname column
always appears as column 3, with however many initials all in column 2?
Then
the rest of the data all lnies up as well. The rest of the data is not
variable in length.

Thanks.