changing location of words either in word or excel

[Ratedr]

I have a list of songs in doc format. They are written like this:

artist - song
song - artist

I want to have the entire list in artist - song format. Is there a
way to either import it into excel so that the song and artist are
seperated into different columns (like - delimited or something) so
that I can just switch them. OR is there a way to do this in word?

 

[paul.robinson]

I have a list of songs in doc format. They are written like this:

artist - song
song - artist

I want to have the entire list in artist - song format. Is there a
way to either import it into excel so that the song and artist are
seperated into different columns (like - delimited or something) so
that I can just switch them. OR is there a way to do this in word?

Hi
Excel can do a lot with text strings, but how can it decide which text
is a song and which is an artist? (is there a number in the songs, a
comma in the artist name that kind of thing?)

regards
Paul

 

[Henk57]

In your example, you can separate the information in Word by replacing
the dash by a tab. In the Replace dialog replace "-" by "^t" (without
the quotes). If you now export to Excel it will be sorted in separate
columns (prompted by the tab). It is also common to split the names in
FirstName and Surname, and here Excel has good possibilities.
As Paul pointed out, you need to figure out a way to discriminate
between song and artist. You may can count the number of spaces maybe,
although that's not 100%. It will depend on how long your list is to
what amount of time to put in some way of automation, or do it by hand.
I hope this points you to the right direction, otherwise give more
details so we can help you more concretely.