Just needed some assistance w/ designing a program to convert files from Reference Manager (ref. database) to Excel in order to delimit authors (when there are multiple authors of a publication), country, and institution (university, etc.).

Currently, I am able to open the files as text within Excel and analyze info. such as 'journal' and 'single author', but Excel is not able to recognize multiple authors (tried opening as Tab delimited, which got messy). Multiple authors are seperated by semi-colans, and selecting the delimit as a semi-colan simply pushed secondary authors into a column already containing info.

The tricky part with extracting the country and institution is that these are contained within the address (one column). In almost all of the citations, the country is listed as the fourth character, but in some instances it is not listed at all; same goes for institution, which is usually listed as the third character.

The program was developed in the past, but for a Mac, and I need a PC compatible program... If this seems like a fairly easy task for someone who is quite computer illiterate let me know; any info. would be appreciated. Otherwise, it may be up to a CS tech.

Thanks.