Excel contact list-going from one row to mult. columns

G

GTRich

I have been tasked with putting together a list of a company's
distributor using their website. I run a regional search on their
website and come up with results, which I then paste into excel.
Unfortunately, these all appear in Excel in rows, such as the following
format:

Smith's Leather
10 Main Street
Anytown, USA 01776
Phone: 202-555-1000
Fax: 202-555-1001
Dealer Type: Retailer
Brands: Coach, Gucci

There is a space between each business's information. To further
complicate things, the lengths of the entires vary, as some have email
addresses, website URLs, and fas numbers, while others do not. does
anyone know of a colution to getting these entries out of the single
first column and breaking them up into categorized columns or is this
just a massive data entry project?
 
D

Dave Peterson

I think I'd browse through the data looking for patterns.

If all the phone numbers have values that begin with "Phone:" and if all the fax
numbers start with "Fax:" and all the email addresses have @ in them (and all
the other cells don't have any @'s in them), you might be able to pick the wheat
from the chaff.

One of your rules may be that if the value ends with 5 digits (or 5, dash, 4),
then it's a zip and then that cell is the last of the addresses.

If the cell starts with HTTP://, it's the URL for that group.

But I think it really depends on whether you can find those patterns and come up
with the rules.

If you could explain the rules so that there are no ambiguities, it _should_ be
able to be mechanized.
 
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