Split Cells in Excel

Splitting cells in Excel is made decidedly easier with a keyboard menu item titled Text to Column. Quite often data will come off a source system and it is not in the format you are looking for. If the values of the cells need to be split then the following steps are how to do just that.

The following video takes you through a couple of examples for splitting cells in Excel.

Split Cells.xlsx

 
 

A common example is to split names in an Excel spreadsheet. The first name and last name may be in a single cell and this might need to be split into separate columns.

Split Cells


Let’s say the data looks as above and we want to split first and last name with the text to columns short cut.

NOTE - in order to split the data from Column A to B we need a spare column in Column B so the data must look as follows.

Split Cell in Excel

Note the additional column.

Split Cells

Highlight the cells you wish to split.

split cells excel

On the Data menu Choose = Text to Columns.

a split6.PNG

 The above dialog appears - choose Delimited then click Next.

Split cells in Excel with text to columns

Choose Space on the above dialog and click NEXT (if you wish you can click the FINISH button).

split cells excel

The final dialog tells you where to put the data however the default is where the first cell in the highlight list is. In the above case it was cell A2. So choose finish and the data will split nicely.

Split text to column

The final product is the splitting of the cells with the help of Text to Columns. It is that simple. The following file outlines this example.

Split Cells.xlsx