I have a task that for a non-programmer is rather daunting. It sounds simple
until you try to to it. I have an Excel file, and within the file is a
column of names in the form of:

Smith,Bob

or sometimes

Smith,Bob J.

What I am required to do is change the names to just initials (first and
last) so that "Smith, Bob" becomes "BS". (This is for privacy reasons...the
rest of the file info will be shared publicly.) The Find/replace feature in
Excel isn't fancy, so I pasted the column into a Word document, which at
least has wildcards and so forth.

I can "find" the names rather inelegantly by searching for
"any character followed immediately by a comma followed by any character"
(using the Word Find expressions available)..but telling it to replace is
another story. I think this is too much to ask of a word processor. I
thought of importing it into Access and using an update query, but to be
honest I don't know enough to make Access do what I want. I also am not
familiar enough with Macros to do much there. I am thinking this is a task
for Visual Basic or something along that line...but as I say, I am no
programmer.

This task needs to be performed on many thousands of names. Any suggestions
are appreciated. I realize I simply may not know enough to perform this task
in a reasonable period of time.

Susan Sutherland
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