While working on business spreadsheets, situations will arise when you need to split one column of data to two or more columns to improve sorting or display of records. For example, address may be required to split into the street name, city, state, pincode. Similarly, names need to be split into first name and last name. Now, splitting a data in excel is very much easy to perform. Below are the steps to perform the split:
1. In the below pic, you can see that we have a column of names which consists of first name and last name delimited by space.
2. Now select the cells which you want to split. So here we need to select the cells from A2 to A8. Then go to Data tab and click Text to Columns ( as marked in the pic below).
3. Now a dialog box will appear with a preview of the selected data and the options to choose the file type. We will chose here as Delimited. then click on Next.
4. Now, you have to select the delimiter. Here, I am selecting space as I have space in between first name and last name. As soon as you select the delimiter, it will show you a preview of cell splitting. Now, click on Next.
5. Now select the type of the column you want to generate. Here I set it as general. But, if you have a different format, you can set it too. Now click on Finish
6. After this, you will get two column with the data split perfectly. Now just give the heading of the two column perfectly so that it can be identified.
Disclaimer: Whenever you try this feature on a large and complex worksheet, perform the split on the copy of the the spreadsheet first in order to ensure that it does not cause any issues.
