Text to Columns the easiest way to add data to an excel worksheet is by opening a file directly in excel. Say each month you get a report electronically, and each month you want to layer the next report onto the report with the prior month’s reports. In month one you would open the original file in excel save and you would be done. In month two you would open month two’s file and copy and paste the data directly into next empty rows in the spread containing month one. So each month you save in the same file one right after the other. So rows 1-100 are January, 101-200 are February… etc.
This is quite basic and may seem easy to you if your familiar with opening files in excel. The monkey wrench arises when you have a file that’s in a different format than excel. Usually CSV “Comma Separated Value” file or a plain text (.txt) file. These files usually need a little manipulation to open in the most usable format. This is where text to columns comes in very handy. Text to columns allows us to parse data in many ways. (Divide a string of data into smaller parts in multiple cells). It allows us to parse the data by choosing a fixed width (if every row of data is equal and the breaks would always be the same) or we can delimit our data by various factors (split the data at every comma, semicolon, period space or any character that you need to delimit the data)
Let’s look at some examples in the video above.