Text to Columns

Text to Columns

This Excel feature is used to split the cell content name of one cell into multiple columns based on a delimiter, such as a space or a special character or based on fixed width. For e.g., you can split the name with domain id in the given email id:  reemapanda@gamil.com.

After applying the above feature, reemapanda and gamil.com will be split into two different columns. Here the delimiter used will be “@”.

The steps for this are as follows:

1. Type your “Hello World” in cell A1 in a new worksheet.

2. Click on the cell that contains your data.

3. Open “Text to columns” wizard box. Click on Data-> Data tool -> Text to Columns.

4. A dialog box appears. Select ‘Delimiter’

5. Select Next. Choose the delimiter, with which you want to separate the text. Here the delimiter is “ ”(space). We will choose space.

6. Click on Finish. You will notice that your text has been split into two different columns. One is comprising “Hello” and another one containing “world”.

Advantages of Text to Columns

1. It is commonly used to quickly separate the first name and last name into two different cells.
2. It is used to fetch the root domain from the URL quickly.
3. This is helpful when we fetch the data from databases or import it from other formats such as Text or CSV.
4. Extract only the first few characters of the specified string.

Keyboard Shortcut

To quickly access Text to Columns in Excel, you can also use the Hotkeys- ALT+ A+ E.