Jason Slater Weblog

A little known feature of Microsoft Excel is the ‘text to columns’ option under the Data menu which allows information in a cell or range of cells to be split into columns. Typically we find this tends to occur on exported lists of address information or such like.

For example if you have a list of information in a cell or a column of cells:

You might want to split the data into columns to make it easier to work with:

This can be achieved by:

• Highlighting the Column (or Columns) containing the information  you want to split
• Click on the Data menu
• Click “Convert Text to Columns”
• Select Delimited (there is also a fixed width option that allows you to split by character positions) then click Next
• Make sure that Comma (or whatever other delimiter you have) is checked then click Next
• Click Destination and choose an empty Column to the right of the data
• Click Finish
• All Done