Excel 2008 : Close Matches for Fantasy Baseball

[washkow]

Hi-
I am working on crunching some data from my fantasy baseball league. Specifically, I have current player ranking and previous draft results and I want to correlate the two, as in whose drafted team currently has the highest rankings. The problem is that the draft results have "other things" following the player's names, and the current player rankings have different "other things" attached. For example, the draft results say, "Curtis Granderson*, NYY CF" while the current player rankings say, "Curtis Granderson, Yankees." To make things worse, the current rosters list things differently also, saying "Curtis Granderson*, NYY CF DL15 [Breaking News]". When I copy and paste (paste special, text) these fellows into excel, all of this info appears in one cell.
Is there a way that I can have the Excel do, for instance, a VLookup on Curtis Granderson, and return results from the cells near the other Curtis Granderson listings?
I was alternately thinking that if this was not possible, is there some other way to get this info from the webpage into the excel other than cutting and pasting special? Another alternative would be if there were a way that I could tell excel to put everything after a "space" into a seperate cell, so that "Curtis" would go in one cell, "Granderson" would go in another, and so forth. I figure that if I did that, I could work something out to look up just "Granderson" and get the data from there.
Thanks!

[NBVC]

As long as the part of text you are trying to match exactly matches a part of the text in the look table, you could probably do a special lookup of it.

Also, to split cells at spaces, go to Data|Text to columns, select Delimited and choose Space in next screen....

Click Finish.

If you need help with lookup, you should post a sample workbook showing what you have and what you need.

[washkow]

OK! That text deliminiter woth the commas and spaces worked great, I am almost there. There is, however, the problem of people on the DL, who the rosters put an asterisk after, as in "Curtis Granderson*" instead of "Curtis Granderson." Is there another way to parse this?
How would I post my workbook for everyone to take a look at? Should I just take a screen shot and post that?
thanks!

[NBVC]

you can do an Edit|Replace and

Find What: ~*

With: (leave blank).

To post workbook.. go to Post Reply and click paperclip icon... browse and upload.