Excel has so many functionalities that managing them all seems almost impossible. However, little by little you can learn some of the most common and practical functions, until you become a true specialist. In this case, we want to talk to you about how to split cells in excel.
Something that can be very useful when it comes to working with spreadsheets that contain a lot of information. Even if you use a program other than Excel, the steps we are going to see will still work for you.
Why is it useful to know how to divide cells in Excel?
Having this competence can help you a lot when it comes to work quickly and efficiently with a spreadsheet. Pay attention to the following reasons why it will be useful for you to know how to carry out this action:
Improve the presentation. When dividing cells pYou can highlight and segment the most important information, something that will improve the presentation of your spreadsheets and allow the data to be better understood.
- Facilitate data manipulation. If you want to break down a text string into smaller parts, you can do it with this functionality. For example, if you have entered the first and last names of different people in a cell, you can segment the information and put the first names in one cell and the last names in another.
- Analysis of data. By dividing the cells you organize the information according to your preferences, and this makes the analysis work much easier.
- Import of external data. If you are importing data obtained from an external source into Excel, that information may not fully meet your needs. However, by dividing cells, you can organize it however you see fit.
- Facilitate sorting and filtering. When you work with large amounts of data, dividing cells can achieve a more effective organization of the information and break it down into more manageable parts.
- Generate graphics. Using the division action you can create graphs that allow a simple visualization of the data that interests you.
- Advanced features. If you use other advanced Excel features, splitting cells can be useful to create custom labels or to apply conditional formatting and highlight certain parts of information.
How to divide cells in Excel step by step
It is clear that this is a very interesting functionality for both initial spreadsheet users and more expert users. Therefore, below we detail step by step how to do this division quickly and easily.
Split previously joined cells in Excel
In some cases we use the option to combine cells to group information. If the cell you are working with is the result of a previous union, it is very easy to separate them.
Click on the combined cell and then go to "Start" in the toolbar at the top. From there go to "Alignment" and click on the cell combination icon. A drop-down menu opens within which you will see the option “Separate cells”. This splits the cells you joined before and restores them to their original state.
Split a cell into multiple columns
Let's imagine that we have created a database with the name and position of each of the people in our company, so that the information of each person is recorded in a single cell. But now we need that information to be segmented, so that the names are on one side and the position in a different cell. What we need in this case is to divide the cells into several columns.
To achieve this, we are going to use a little trick: the column text layout tool. We select the cell we want to work with and go to the “Data” tab on the toolbar, and from there we go to the subgroup “Data tools”. A dialog box then appears whose purpose is to help us convert text into columns.
As separators we are going to choose "space". The “tabulation” option, which appears checked by default, can be left as it is or unchecked, because it will not affect the final result.
In the preview window you will see how Excel It will divide the cells. If it is not what you want, mark new separators until the information is completely divided the way you want. When you have it ready click on "Finalize" and you're done, Your information is now divided into several cells in consecutive columns.
Split cells in Excel into one or more rows
Suppose you don't want to divide the contents of a cell into consecutive columns but into rows. To achieve this, we can use the functionality of transposing rows and columns.
We follow exactly the same steps that we saw in the previous section, so that the content of a cell is divided into several cells collected in consecutive columns. Once we have this ready, we are going to transpose the columns to turn them into rows.
We select the range of data we want to work with and click on “Copy”. Now we go to the first cell to which we want to transfer the data, we select it and click on “Paste” > “Transpose”, and we have it ready.
An important issue when splitting cells in Excel and converting them into different columns or rows: we have to make sure that there is no information written in the new cells that we are going to use, because It will be overwritten and we would lose the original content of those cells.
With these small adjustments that we have seen, you can make the information in your spreadsheets much better organized. Make it more visual and easier to understand and work with.
Splitting cells in Excel is not complicated, you have already seen that the process is quite intuitive. Follow the steps we have taken and, once you have done it a couple of times, we are sure that this functionality will have no secrets for you.