How do I grab data from every tenth row of a 5,000 row spreadsheet???

[Richard McPike]

At work, we're doing a poll of 500 people, and we've got a list of 5,000
potential people to contact in a vast, 5,000-row Microsoft Excel
spreadsheet.

Is there a way to run a query or a macro or something that will
automatically go in and select every tenth row on this document and
either erase the intervening rows and move all the remaining to the
top, and/or copy the contents of every tenth row into a new document
(but without nine blank rows between each row?)

We're using Microsoft Excel v.X on Mac OS X Jaguar.

Most of what we do is graphic design work. We're all quite fluent in
Illustrator, Photoshop, Quark and InDesign. But Excel is a strange,
foreign language to us.

Someone at another message board pointed me to the VLOOKUP
function, but its some sort of strange code garbage that wants me to
point it to arrays or something. Jesus, I just want to SORT and FILTER a
list. This can't be hard to do. It shouldn't be hard to do, at the very
least. If it is, that's a massive failure of Microsoft's.

All I want is all the data in all the columns of every tenth row of my
spreadsheet. I want to delete all the intervening rows and sort all the
material to the top so that I don't have to scroll through 5,000 lines to
see it all.

Is this possible? If I have to use this BS VLOOKUP thing, what do I put
into its variable spots?

And why isn't there an sort option in Excel that lets me "Show only
every X row starting with row Y."????

If anyone among the teeming millions can help, I would really, really
appreciate it.

 

[Mike Vaughan]

Ricahrd,

I too have wished to do this - many times. The only way i
found was by using some lookup function OR, repeating the
numbers 1 to 10 alongside your data (use copy paste etc)
and then filtering the list to show, say, all the number
3's.

If you find a real way of doing this, please let me know.

Mike