Converting a list to a table in Excel

[dchakrab]

Hi all,

I have a list in Excel. It's basically a few entries, an empty cell to seperate them, and then a few more entries. The data is an organization's name, followed by a few cells of contact information.

This is making it impossible to mail-merge. Ideally, I need the data in several columns, so I'd have a name column, one for address, one for phone, etc. How do I convert this? There are over 600 records in this sheet, and I have several other sheets, so doing this by hand is not an option.

Any ideas? I tried transposing rows and columns, but Excel won't let me do it with this many records...not enough columns allowed. I'm also thinking I might be able to pull this off if i can get all of the records for one data set into one cell, instead of several rows in a cluster. Is that worth exploring?

I'm also thinking the easiest solution might be to write a macro to grab all the information and stick it where I want...how would I do this?

Thanks; all help appreciated,

Dave.

 

[EagleKeeper]

Try to export the data and then re-import in the appropriate type formatting desired.
Use as a delimiter to seperate the fields a character that will not be used within the data itself.
That character can be used to seperated the fields when importing

You do not seem to be a programmer, therefore the above option may be the easiest.

 

[PowerEngineer]

I'm not clear on the lay-out of your Excel file. I assume you define a "record" as being all the data (name, address, phone, etc.) for an organization. Is there only one "record" per row in the spreadsheet (or are there multiple records per row)? Is all the data for each organization contained in a single cell?

If there's one record per row and the data is all merged into cells in that row, then Eaglekeeper's suggestion may be easiest: save the spreadsheet as a text file and then reimport it into Excel defining a "space" as the delimiter (hopefully there are no spaces in the data).