how do i delete everything after a particular character, after each such character?

[gilgilgil]

thank you, everyone, for your great suggestions.

i tried paul corrado's very simple solution below:

Find What: enter " - *" (without the ""s)
Replace With: enter " -" (if you still want the dash otherwise leav
that
field blank)

that worked great except that many of the lines that continued onto
second line were unaffected and need to be deleted. fortunately tha
data that needs to be kept has an asterisk and some spaces in front o
it (i.e., "* ") so perhaps there's some way to have excel chec
each cell for the existence of this text and, if such asterisk is NO
in the cell, then delete the cell...any suggestions as to how this ca
be done?

many thanks in advance

 

[Paul Corrado]

Not exactly clear on what you have.

But it sounds like the data that needs to be kept starts with "* "

If that is the case, you can sort the data. All of those entries will
appear together. You can then delete the rest.

If you need to get it back in its original order. Use a helper column.
Enter the formula =ROW() and copy down. Use Copy/Paste Special Values on
that formula to convert the results to numeric entries. Make sure you
include this column in the sort and use it as the criteria for a final sort
to return the data to its original form.

Or, if you are familiar with the Data/Filter, you can use that instead.

Also, Excel doesn't see the relationship between text in adjacent cells and
recognize that it is, for example, the continuation of a sentence. The
Edit/Replace feature can only analyze the contents of each cell.