Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Another project...separate names from a huge list

Yesterday I received another Excel project: a 19,000+ list of people's names, all in the same field -- i.e. First Middle Last Suffix. The kicker was that not all people had middle initials. Some had middle initials, while others had full middle names. and Some were Jr.'s, II's, etc. Then, of course, there's dealing with "Von Lastnames" and "van Lastnames" and "Del Lastnames" and "De Lastnames" and "De La Lastnames." It's crazy.

My task was to separate them all into First Name, Middle Name/Init., Last Name, Suffix fields.

I did it without using any VBA, though in my spare time I'm going to try to figure out how to use a Bayesian Algorithm and some code to accomplish the same task.

Thanks, Craig!

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