I've managed tests for a project that I was with since its infancy. I used Microsoft Test Manager to tie tests to requirements and organize them in folders. It went well.
However, now I'm being tasked with organizing tests for a program that has been in production for a decade and is much more complex. The regression test we have is just a list of almost 7,000 steps in an Excel sheet, not even broken into tests. I'm looking for any advice on how to manage this project. I want to organize test cases without wasting a lot of time. Thoughts?
Something else to consider is that I've also been tasked with automating the majority of these tests (using TestComplete). While organizing the existing regression tests will be faster than automating them, I'm considering that automation will naturally result in organization. So should I propose to focus on well-documented automation and not have many manual regression tests?