Copy First Character in One Cell, Paste into Another....for 4,500 Rows?

jdanniel

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Hello, everyone, I’m using Office 365.

I’ve exported some data in an Access database to Excel. Attached to this post is the spreadsheet, which I’m still in the process of tweaking and designing.

What I’d like help with, if possible, is this: I’d like to automate entering a prefix in the Album Prefix column.

What I mean by that is this: I want to take the first letter or number in the Album cell, and copy it to the corresponding Album Prefix cell.

For example, if you look at the beginning of the Main worksheet, you’ll see there are album prefixes for each album by 10 CC.

Or, if you scroll down to the end of the worksheet, you’ll see there are album prefixes for some albums by ZZ Top.

I’d like to have album prefixes for each record. Since there are about 4,500 records in this spreadsheet, I obviously don’t want to do this by hand. I was hoping there might be a macro or VBA code that would allow me to do this. I’m not really a programmer, so I have no idea how to write VBA to do this.

If it can be done via a macro, I don’t know what steps to take to do this.

So, I was hoping I could request some assistance with this. Is it possible to automate this task? If so, what’s the most practical procedure?
Thank you! Jd
 

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  • Music Collection Spreadsheet.xlsm
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Won't the formula =LEFT([@Album],1) down the Album Prefix column work ?
 
I'm not really an expert on formulas. I just learned something. I had no idea this could be done with a formula. Easy, too. It looks like that worked. Thank you!

But I do have a follow-up question, for the sake of learning: Does the number 1 in that formula represent the character you want copied? If I substituted the number 2, would it put in the second character? I suppose I should just read about the LEFT function, and experiment with this formula. Thanks again!
 
Okay, just learned something. The number represents the QUANTITY of characters you want copied. If I substitute 2, it copies the first two characters. Interesting. Now I'm going to dabble with this formula a bit more. Thanks again.
 
If you wanted the 2nd character you would use the mid function
=MID([@Album],2,1)
 
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