How many hours have you spent retyping a column of names into ‘first name’ and ’second name’?

Me, thousands (probably). I have spent years under the illusion that you can combine a ‘first name’ column and a ’second name’ column into one using concatenation (posh word eh?!). But thought that if you received data where the full name was in one field, you had to retype the data.

Wrong!

Thanks to the power of the Internet, I recently found the solution. And you will not believe how simple it is!

Here are the steps:

1. Open your spreadsheet
2. Place your cursor in the column to the RIGHT of the Name column (because you want the blank columns to appear to the right of the Name column)
3. Select Insert / Columns from the File Menu. Repeat as required. **
4. Highlight the whole Name column (you do this by clicking on the letter at the top of the column)
5. Select Data / Text to Columns… from the File Menu
6. Ensure ‘Delimited’ is toggled and click on [Next]
7. Untick ‘Tab’ and tick ‘Space’ and click on [Next]
8. Click on [Finish]
9. Click on [OK] to the question, “Do you want to replace the contents of the destination cells” (before doing this, though, be sure you’ve inserted enough blank columns – see below).

** You need to end up with enough blank columns for the data to fill.
The idea is you need one column per word that currently resides in the Name column.
So, for example, if all your names are, for example, John Smith (i.e. just two words) then you need to insert one blank column.
However, if ANY of the names in the column have three words (eg. Andrew John Smith), you need to create two blank columns.
And so on.
If you don’t do this then some of your existing data will be overwritten.

Now I know this, mail merging has become so much easier! I hope you find it beneficial too

If I can help you with anything else relating to data, do get in touch.

Warm regards,
Cat Young

Solve the Web
www.solve-the-web.co.uk