Separating Text into
Two Columns in Excel
Have you ever wished you had
set up your data differently in Excel so it would be more functional?
Well, Excel's "Text To Columns" feature can be real helpful
when you want to try this.
Here's a sample:
Let's say you have people's
names in column A, formatted like this:
Joe Smith
Mary Jones
Bob Johnson
And now you want to do a
Mail Merge in Word using this Excel file as your data source and you
want the Last Name and First Name to be separate fields or you want to
sort your Excel file by last name and you can't do this with it set up
this way. This is easy to fix.
Simply highlight all the
cells in column A and go to the Data menu and select "Text to
Columns". When this box comes up, be sure the dot is in the
radio button next to "Delimited" and notice the sample of how
your data looks and click on the Next button.
In this box, remove any
checks in the Delimiters section that might be there now and put a check
beside "Space". This will tell Excel that you want a new
column every time there is a space in column A. Your box should
look like this:
Click Next and then click
Finish and your First Names are now in Column A and your Last Names are
in Column B.
This is a real easy way to
clean up that Excel file when the data is relatively straightforward and
consistent.
Hang in there!
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