I have a column of cells in excel which contain mails, some only contain one mail as they should but others, have more than one email per cell in this format:
, , What I want to achieve is getting them like this:
I´m guessing (don´t take my word on it) you could do some kind of if statement along the lines of
if (cell contains ", ")
get string from ", " to ", " and paste somehow
else "b1"You may be screaming at your screen right now :) (or laughing) but it´s just how would approach it, no idea of the functions to be used or if it is even possible this way.
So if you have any ideas I appreciate it!!
Just in case, I want to do a csv out of this file so, any workaround that would get this done would do...
Thanks in advance!
Trufa
BTW I hope I have explained the problem clear enough if not please ask for clarifications!
EDIT: The problem is actually solved, I gave in and did it one by one, the one method that never fails you :) Iwpuld appreciate any ideas anyway for the future and for knowledge sake!
5 Answers
Within Excel, try Data -> Text to Columns.
Then choose "," as the delimiter. This will put column breaks where the commas are now.
1Can't you just save as a CSV and do a search and replace for , to \n?
Export your Excel file to a csv.
Copy it across to a Linux machine and edit it in Vim editor.
Then type:
%s/,/\\n/gThis is the breakdown of that command:
- : - run command
- %s - substitute
- / - separator
- , - string to find
- / - separator
- **** - a control character to ignore the next character, but in this case we want the following \n part to be the string it replaces the comma with
- \n - string to replace comma with
- / - separator
- g - globally
This will find and replace the commas with a line break globally and put every cell onto a new line. You can then reimport this file into Excel.
Apologies if you dont use Linux - that is my speciality and the editor and string manipulation tools are much better than on Windows.
1I'm not sure if my answer fits in here since it's more of a Stackoverflow answer, but you could write a macro to do it fairly easily. For example, the following macro would assume that the current email addresses are in the first column and would copy them to the second column:
Cells(1, 1).Select
Dim curr As String
Dim cnt As Integer
cnt = 0
For i = 1 To ActiveCell.SpecialCells(xlLastCell).Row curr = Cells(i, 1).Value If InStr(curr, "@") Then If InStr(curr, ",") Then Dim tmp() As String tmp = Split(curr, ",") For j = LBound(tmp) To UBound(tmp) cnt = cnt + 1 Cells(cnt, 2).Value = tmp(j) Next Else cnt = cnt + 1 Cells(cnt, 2).Value = curr End If End If
Next iI don't know VBA that much though, so might be better ways of doing it.
So you want the line breaks instead of commas, then you need to find and replace them with char(10). Try this formula.
=SUBSTITUTE(A2,",",CHAR(10))
The formula will replace commas from the text in A2 and replace them with a line break.
Eg: If A2 contains:
,
then it will return as:
