Text to Columns

Split one column into many based on text content

Text to columns offers the ability to split one column into many based on characters that appear in that column.

Any column can be split on a number of different characters combinations:

Option

Description

Common Delimiter

Split on commonly-used characters:

  • Tab

  • Comma

  • Semicolon

  • Space

  • Pipe

Custom Delimiter

Enter your own custom delimiter to split on or

Enter a regex string to identify characters to split on

You also have the option to identify whether consecutive delimiters should be treated as one, or if your data has enclosing quotes.

Note that regex and multi-character custom delimiters cannot be used in conjunction with the option to treat consecutive delimiters as one

Example

Let's say we have a list of email addresses that we want to split into multiple columns:

We want to split on the . inside the emails, so we select the Custom delimiter and enter .. We get the following result:

Note that some emails have multiple periods inside them -- the number of resulting columns equals the number of delimiters identified plus one.

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