Macro To Extract Tickers / Pivot Table

I need to manipulate some data in order to make it reasonable. I'm reading up on Macro's now in order to be able to do this stuff in the future, but I think macro's are a long term thing.

Actually before I go into that, is there any book one can recommend for macro's? I do have a friend's books, How to Do Everything with MS Office Excel 2003, MS Excel Bible 2003, and MS Office - Excel 2003 Formulas. Are these good or any other recommendations? In particular I would like some data to play around w/ so that when in the book they tel me to do something I actually have some data to manipulate. I imagine learning the basics of macro's will be easy enough, but as I understand it the real power of macro's comes from programming in VB, and I dont see how that can be covered in these books.

Now for the more specific questions -

My raw data looks like the attached excel file called Raw Data, I want it to end up as the other attached excel file called Result. How would I create a macro to read where the ticker begins and ends? Is there any way to do it w/o VB knowledge?

Raw Data:
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Resulting Data:
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More importantly, I want to be able to order the tickers by how many times they've been mentioned. For example in the second excel file called Result, Laura has been mentioned twice as often as anyone else. When I sort this list I want to sort by who's been mentioned the most. So I'd like to see 6 lines of her data, followed by the person mentioned the second most (if they had 5 lines, the next 5 should be them etc). For this one would pivot tables do the job, or do I need macro's for this as well?