If you are an avid excel user like me then you probably like the text to columns feature which will take one cell and split it into multiple cells based on a delimiter. I use this a lot when I have a spreadsheet that has peoples names in it. Oftentimes the first and last name are together in the same cell. Text to Columns helps me to seperate them.
However, I am a big fan of Google docs, so how do I do this same feature in Docs? Use the function =SPLIT(array, delimiter). So for example I had a spreadsheet that had First Last in the same cell. So I inserted two blank columns and in the first column, in cell D2, I put in =Split(C2,” “) where I put a space in between quotation marks (a requirement when telling excel you have text). The first name was put in cell D2 and the last name was put in cell E2. Unlike excel the original column was untouched, so just be aware you’ll have additional data columns.
2 thoughts on “Google Docs – Text to Columns in a spreadsheet”
Thank you this worked like a charm – very good post.
This is a great tip and much easier than copy/pasting into Excel and using Text to Columns. Thanks again for another timesaving technique Alice!