Copying non-Excel data into Excel

You might need to select and copy data from another program into Excel, however sometimes the format it appears in when it's pasted into Excel is not always easy to work with. It can often squash all your data into one column.



That's where a niffy (yes I said niffy) tool called 'Text to columns' is great! If your data is squashed into one column you may be able to split it out quite easily.

The key is to have something consistent which separates each bit of data. For example does your data have what's known as a 'separator' or 'delimiter' between each piece of data?

Fortunately we have a comma in-between each piece of data in the above which will make the process straightforward.

1 - Select the data you need to split up and click 'Text to Columns'

2 - Walk through the Excel wizard steps.

Step 1 : Select 'Delimited' we have a comma to separate each field.

Click 'Next'

Step 2 : Tick 'Comma', this comma is a delimiter and will trigger Excel to put data after each comma into a new column. You can cee that Excel gives you a data preview based on the comma splits in the 'Data preview' section. This looks good to me so far.

Click 'Next'

Step 3 : Here you can specify type data per column. I'm happy to leave the columns as 'General' format. You can change the format later anyway.

Click 'Finish'.

Now you have all your data separated into columns. Much easier to use and analyse at a later point and it only took a few minutes.