I have a friend who has created multiple Excel
spreadsheets for the projects she has been working on. Each
spreadsheet contains the contacts for that particular project. Each
filename has the project number in the title i.e. "234 this is a
project.xls".

We want to create a master contact list for all projects, because a
contact can belong to multiple projects we understand there may be
duplicates. However, ideally we do not want to open, extract and
close 2,500 files. Each spreadsheet has the same column headings but
may have 1 row or may have many rows.

The other issue is that in the new list, we need to retain the
project number of the file the contact was extracted from. So the
new list would be made of multiple entries, each of which look like
this.

Project No.,contact type, contact name, contact address, contact
telephone.

I hope this makes sense to you all, I was wondering if anyone could
help me out here to make this job significantly easier.

Any suggestions would be most helpful. Any questions just post them
back.