How to separate text into two columns in Excel
Please checkout this list with more How to style tutorials in Excel: • How to use UPPER in Excel
In this short video we will see how to separate text into two columns in Microsoft Excel.
I have some fake data: a first name, a last name and an email address and I would like to separate this data range into 3 separate columns starting with column F.
The first thing that we have to do is to select all the data and I'll do that by clicking anywhere in the data range and then press CTRL + A on Windows or CMD+A if you're on a mac os.
Next, I go to the Data tab and I look in the fourth group for the Text To Columns button and then click on it.
This opens up this wizard with 3 steps.
The step number one is selecting if our data has delimiters or if we'd like to separate our text by a fixed number of characters.
It's important to note here that Excel already determines if your data is delimited or not so it's best to go with the option that Excel selected for you if you're not sure.
We have a semicolon as a data separator but your data could have commas, tabs, spaces or even a custom delimiter.
We click next and the wizard moves to step number 2 which lets us set the delimiters for our data. We can pick between multiple options and I will just select the semicolon since this is my data delimiter.
Notice how we also have a preview of how our data will look like which is quite useful.
We click next and we go to the last step which lets us select each individual column and set it's data format. If we change the format the title of the preview column changes as well based on what value we select and we can even skip columns and not add them into our final data set if we pick the last option from here.
I'll just format everything as text and pick a destination for where I'd like to have the new range which will be cell F2, click on finish and here we go.
We separated the awfully looking data into 3 separate columns.
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That's it for the video, thanks for watching until the end and have a nice day!