Use Word’s Replace to Transpose a Column of Names

function paroles sub to substitute a tug of names Available fromhttp//blogs. techrepublic. com. com/msoffice/? p=4156 take care November 22nd, 2010 Author Susan Harkins Category Microsoft battle cry Youll often see a column of names entered in a Word document either as a list or part of a table. Listing the names is no problem, but changing their order after theyre entered could be. For instance, allows say your document contains a list of names entered in firstname lastname format, but you want them in lastname, firstname format. Do you have to re-enter them?No, on that points a simple wildcard trick you can use with Words Replace feature that will take care of the transposing for you. To carry Word to transform a list or column of names, do the following Select the list of names you want to transpose. From the Edit menu, pick Replace. In Word 2010, click Replace in the Editing classify on the Home tab. Click the More button and check the Use Wildcards option. This is a n important stepif you miss it, this technique wont work. In the Find What control, enter () (), with a space character between the ii sets.In the Replace With control, enter the following characters 2, 1, with a space character in the first place the second slash character. Click Replace All. Word will transpose the first and last names and separate them with a comma character. When Word asks you to expand the search, click No, and then Close to return to the document. Wildcard explanation one time you understand the wildcards, the whole trick is easily exposed () The parentheses arent square(a) wildcards, not in a matching sense. They allow you to divide a pattern into logical sequences. The brackets mark the beginning and ending of a develop or phrase. The slash character replaces characters, and is used with a number that specifies a bracketed component (above). In this case, the Find What code splits the both names into two separate sequences. The 2 component in the Repl ace What code replaces the content of the first sequence with the limit of the second sequence. The 1 component replaces the contents of the second sequence with the contents of the first. As you can see, youre not limited to just transposing first and last names. With these wildcard tools, you can rearrange kind of a bit of content