Text to columns - Delimited

Choose between one of the standard delimiters – Tab, Comma, Space, Dot, Semicolon. A preview of the data is displayed showing where the column breaks will be inserted.

If you have your own delimiter, select Others and enter the delimiter in the edit box.

Sometimes your data might have extra delimiters (usually where there are blank fields). For example:

123,,,,, 1-1-2004, Mortgage payment, 680.00
124
,,,,, 4-1-2004, Bank fee, 10.00
125,,,,, 5-1-2004, Southern Electric DD, 55.23

In such cases, check the Treat consecutive delimiters as one box to avoid a series of blank columns.

Some data will include text qualifiers to mark the beginning and end of a field. For example:

123, 1-1-2004, "Mortgage, payment", 680.00

In the above case, the text qualifiers, the quotes, are used to prevent the field – which contains a delimiter – from being treated as two separate fields. Select the Text Qualifier if they appear in your data.

Click Finish to apply the conversion – the text will be replaced by the converted data.

See also: Converting text into columns