Ah, Army IT style. Back in my conscript days, the unit's secretary once had to take a list of soldiers from system A (LASTNAME/FIRSTNAME) and convert them to the format required by system B (FIRSTNAME,LASTNAME)... so she was doing this manually in Excel: click, highlight, ctrl-X, delete, cursor cursor, ",", ctrl-V, repeat.
So I dumped the file to CSV, wrote a one-liner awk script that did the transformation, and imported the result back as a new column. No medal, but one very happy secretary!
What really astonished me, though, is that she didn't even think that this kind of thing was possible. In her worldview, one Machine spit out data in a fixed format and another Machine demanded it back in another, and it was just too bad if humans had to do mindless work to conform to their needs.
You could text-to-columns it then concant it via B1 & "," & A1 then drag down. Alternatively, you could use =left(find()) and =right(find()) to function it.
I touched on it in the mainteannce/ops space, but the admin space is also susceptable to this. I find that there's a very rapid change in fundamental understanding of capability between age groups. Of course there's exceptions in both parties but many people born after about 1980 really do underestimate the benefits they have by having grown up with personal computers. They simply just think about them differently.
I'm sure you can do that 'natively' in Excel, but not my field of expertise; IIRC I actually spent longer faffing about in the Excel docs looking for a way to do this (and failing) than writing the awk regexes.
It did make me wonder how often some variant of this happens every day. "Data entry" is still a job, after all...
Occasionally I'll get a letter from the bank or phone company and the name is wrong .. and then I realise that this massive multi-billion turnover company has some poor data entry person retyping my data at some point in their chain. Then I wonder how on Earth they let that happen.
So I dumped the file to CSV, wrote a one-liner awk script that did the transformation, and imported the result back as a new column. No medal, but one very happy secretary!
What really astonished me, though, is that she didn't even think that this kind of thing was possible. In her worldview, one Machine spit out data in a fixed format and another Machine demanded it back in another, and it was just too bad if humans had to do mindless work to conform to their needs.