Question

In this case, I want to extract the beginning text in a cell and leave the remainder intact.
e.g. a series of cells contain:

2nd Unit. Miami
3rd Production Staff. Toronto
1st Ad. San Francisco

I want to break this up without using Text to columns as previous rows are formatted differently and these last few rows are outliers that I want to handle.

I thought Regular Expressions might do it, but that seems a bit complex.

My algorithm idea is:
1. grab the wanted text (what function or custom sub would do that?)
2. Past the text to it’s new location
3. Cut the text from the cell, leaving the remaining text.

Seems simple but I’m still wending my way through VBA forest, and at the rate I’m going it’s going to end up faster doing it by hand. But this seems like a good opportunity to learn some VBA tricks.

TIA

Update:
I want to take the text up to the “.\ ” and move it to a different column, keeping the remainder where it is.

Answer 1

Since you seem to want to modify the cell text in place, VBA will be required.

Inside a loop that sets cl to the cell to be processed:

str = cl.value
i = Instr(str, ".\")
cl = Trim(Mid$(str, i + 2))  ' assuming you want to exclude the ".\"
cl.Offset(0, 1) Trim(Left$(str, i - 1)) ' Places the original first part one cell to the right