but in the time you've been given to complete it, I don't know of any way to make it easier or quicker.
I assume that some sort of macro would do it, but at the moment I wouldn't know where to start, and that would take time to write and test anyway.
Your best bet is to just slug away at it. Perhaps do half an hour, take a 5 minute break, then continue.
Sorry, but that time scale makes this difficult to devise any improved method.
Mark
So, I've got this issue. I have a document with about 5000 cells that have individually listed dates; I need to identify all of the concurrent periods and merge them into one cell. So this:
Last First Rank 10/01/2010
Last First Rank 10/02/2010
Last First Rank 10/03/2010
Last First Rank 10/04/2010
Needs to become one cell that looks like this:
Last First Rank 10/01/2010-10/04/2010
At the rate I'm going, manually processing all of this will take about 18 hours. I was given this assignment an hour ago and given until first thing tomorrow morning to get it done. Are there any shortcuts or anything excel can do to help me with this?

Chowhound
Comic Vine
GameFAQs
GameSpot
Giant Bomb
TechRepublic