What about adjacent or surrounding characters that are unique within the
text? For example, are the name surrounded by parentheses or encased in
quote marks while none of the remaining text are?

--
Rick (MVP - Excel)


"Barbie" wrote in message
...
I am lucky that the language is never part of the company name. I had given
a
lot of thought to the sequential order of where the name of the language
falls in the sequence from both beginning and end, but there wasn't
consistency there. Your previous post worked like a charm for me, and I
have
learned a valuable lesson in Excel. Thanks so much!

"Ron Rosenfeld" wrote:

On Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:36:01 -0800, Barbie

wrote:

Hello.
I have a large spreadsheet that lists many text strings in a single
column.
The text strings include the name of a company, product, platform, and
language. I would like to isolate the language from the text string and
populate the cells in another column with only the name of that
language. The
text string does not follow a consistent format where there are the same
number of words or where the language is always in the same position in
the
sequence. There are 24 different languages that are used in the text
strings,
and some of the languages are more than one word, such as "Chinese
Traditional" or "Chinese Simplified."

Using the formula =IF(SEARCH("German",D44),"German") works if the word
German is part of the text string in cell D44. However, I need to be
able to
add all of the other languages into a single formula to verify line by
line
what language is in the text string.

When I try to add other languages to the formula, such as
=IF(SEARCH("German",D44),"German"),IF(SEARCH("Dan ish",D44),"Danish"),
the
result is #VALUE!, which is not what I want.

Can this be accomplished through a formula, and if so, how? Would it
work
better to set this up as a macro? If so, any guidance on how to do that
would
be much appreciated.

Thank you!

One other thought: There could be confusion if a language is part of the
company name or product.

Is it possible that the language is always in the same sequential
position
counting from the end of the string, or some other way of differentiating
the
language from the same word in a company name?
--ron