evaluating one of two items in a single cell

Hi all,

I am creating a spreadsheet to log both regular and overtime hours on a job for each employee on each day. Ultimately my question is this:

If I were to enter reg. and OT hours in each cell (row-employee, column-date), as numbers separated by a comma or semi-colon...could I have excel evaluate only one of the two numbers in the cell for the entire spread sheet if say, I wanted to sum the total number of regular hours and total number of overtime hours on the job?

My thoughts were if I was able to do that I could just write a short and sweet sum function to sum regular and OT hours separately.

EX:
01/06/2010
John Doe 8,3

Thanks!
Matt