Removing data

Hello,

I cannot attach a workbook to this since it contains Confidential information, but I was hoping someone could help me.

I work in a 911 Call Center, and we have a phone system with internal and external numbers entered into a database. That database was exported as an Excel form. The phone is setup to require pauses or extra numbers to be dialed in some cases, so the actual format of the phone numbers exported in an unusual manner, such as:

"1: h,954-963-3225; Voice: DTMF Transfer;"

There is no constant for how they appear. Typically, it will appear they way it is written above, yet other times it will be "1: 954-963-3225; Voice: DTMF Transfer;" (for example)

I only want the actual phone number to appear in the column on the revised worksheet I am creating. I know that there is a way to extract certain parts of a string of text (which I do not know how to do BTW), but can this be done if there is no uniform manner in which the text was entered? I could do it row by row and manually remove, but I am looking at roughly 6700 rows of content.

Thanks

I appreciate your assistance, but I am realizing that eliminating certain elements is a tiny portion of the problem. I started to mess with it, and just replaced certain text items with a blank; this solved part of the problem. When the form exported, however, it automatically merged certain cells. Let's say that there were 4 separate phone numbers for a particular entry: the name of the entry, "Joe's Garage" for example, appears in column A with A1:A4 merged and centered and the phone number is in column B with a separate number in each B1, B2, B3, B4. To attempt to sort the info, I have to Unmerge the cells. So, using the Joe's garage example, I will have a lot of blank entries in column A. Ugh!!

I solved it myself. Select Column A. Find and Select>>Go To Special>>Blanks. When it selected all the blanks, I clicked on A2, for example, and it filled every blank with the one above.

Sometimes I look for help just to save time. Thanks for your assistance!