Un-merging data

[Lewis]

Have concatenated firstname and lastname into a single
field called "contact" and posted it to a contact
management program.
Now need to reverse process by downloading from contact
management program to Excel and separating contact into
firstname and lastname columns.
How?

 

[JE McGimpsey]

one way:

Data/Text to Columns/Delimited/Space

 

[Harlan Grove]

Have concatenated firstname and lastname into a single
field called "contact" and posted it to a contact
management program.
Now need to reverse process by downloading from contact
management program to Excel and separating contact into
firstname and lastname columns.
How?

If you concatenated first name John and last name Smith as

John Smith

or

Smith, John

use Data > Text to Columns, choose Delimited, and set the field separator to
space or comma. On the other hand, if you concatenated first and last names
as

JohnSmith

or

SmithJohn

you'll need complicated formulas to split the names apart. Easiest to start
by defining a name like Seq referring to =ROW(INDIRECT("1:256")), then if A1
contained SmithJohn, use the formulas

B1: (last name)
=LEFT(A1,MATCH(TRUE,CODE(MID(A1,Seq+1,1))<90,0))

C1: (first name)
=MID(A1,LEN(B1)+1,256)

 

[Gord Dibben]

Lewis

Data>Text to Columns>De-limited by....your choice.

Gord Dibben Excel MVP