Re: Reversing word order in Excel 2007 cells

[Ken Poshedly <poshedly -at- bellsouth -dot- net>]

Well, with all the work still on our collective plate, and my 
unfamiliarity with scripts and macros (yes, I'm that sheltered), I 
typed up a nicely worded thank-you note back to the contact at the 
home office in China asking them to do some basic changes and then 
resend the docs to me once more for a final look-see.

Basically, my biggest request was for them to do the reverse-order 
wording, using an initial capital letter for the first word only.

Yep, we could do that here, but then it would take days to take care 
of the thousands of lines of terms and then be really cramped to get 
our own work done.

So, that's where it stands. I'll post anything of interest I get back 
from them.

-- Ken in Atlanta

At 03:25 PM 4/13/2010, Ned Bedinger wrote:
>On 04/12/2010 08:56 AM, Ken Poshedly wrote:
> > Hey gang,
> >
> > Does anybody familiar with the inner workings of Excel 2007 so 
> much so that they know if there is a way to change the word order 
> within a cell?
>
>Advisory:  Long detailed mechanistic description of how to do this. Sent
>to list solely for interested parties. Advanced users and English majors
>would rather do almost anything (e.g., have dry heaves) than read this,
>so please skip or delete if your vagus nerve starts twitching. I'll
>understand.
>
>I don't have Excel so I can't check for you, but someone somewhere has
>probably developed an add-in to do this. Rather than looking far and
>wide for native or add-in capabilities, consider creating a simple tool
>to handle the regular "two word, just reverse them" items.  That'd save
>you some time compared to manually repeating the steps.
>
>In the context of what you're trying to do with a bunch of regular and
>irregular text manipulation tasks, you would spend days and weeks
>developing the logic to handle each term according to unique rules. But
>if you discover you're a talented programmer, and you further find that
>having a macro that handles every single term correctly would be useful
>over time, bear in mind that it *can* be done but developing it would
>kill your chances of getting the project out the door on time, this
>time, even if it might expedite future projects, if there are one.
> >
>
>OK, ready? Got a backup copy of the spreadsheet?
>
>Record a vba macro following my recipe below. It will  process one
>record at a time. It will assume the cursor is in the first cell to be
>processed by reversing word order, it will reverse the words and insert
>whatever punctuation and spacing you want, then it will go to the next
>cell in the same column, where you (the user) will have to decide
>whether to run it or manually click the cursor into the next cell to
>process.
>
>Ready? Wait--iirc, you have to enable VBA in Excel, look into this if
>you can't find how to record a macro:
>
>
>Put the cursor at the very beginning of the first cell containing words
>to be reversed.
>
>Start recording
>
>Select the cell (isn't this done with edit>select>cell? I forget...)
>
>Search (edit>find) the selection for the character that separates the
>words. Is it a space? If so, you'd search for the first space. I think
>you can do this several ways (isn't there a symbolic way, like
>edit>find>^s ?), but you'll have to research that if you need it.
>
>Space selected? Fine, hit <delete> to kill the space, hold down <shift>
>+ <right cursor> until the 2nd word is all selected, hit <shift> + <del>
>to kill second word, copying it to the clipboard. Real power users will
>know the right keyboard combos to select the next word, cut, paste, etc.
>
>With one word left in cell, move cursor to beginning of cell, type what
>you want to appear between words (punctuation, spacing, etc), move to
>beginning of cell again and hit <shift><insert> to paste the second word.
>
>Cursor down one cell, then put cursor at beginning of cell.
>
>Stop recording.
>
>Test and debug. Realize that after 8 or 10 test runs, you'll forget and
>run the macro with the cursor in the wrong cell. Try to be more careful.
>
>Heave ho,
>
>Ned Bedinger
>doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com
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