When working in spreadsheets you may come across many situations where you need to slice the data of a cell into two or more cells.
Sometimes you might have two pieces of information with a space in between, and you may want to split this up into two different columns.
You might also have text that is separated by a comma that you want to split up.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to split a cell in Google Sheets using Split text to columns and using the Split function.
Table of Contents
Can You Split Cells in Google Sheets?
Yes, in Google Spreadsheets you can split cells. The easiest way is by using Split text to columns, but you can also use the Split function.
We will show you both methods below.
How to Use Split Text to Columns
- Select the cells that you want to split by clicking and holding to highlight them
- Navigate to the top menu and select Data
- In the drop-down menu select Split text to columns
- From here you have a few options: comma, semicolon, period, space, or you can enter a custom option. Select the one that is separating your cell data (space in our example)
- This will split your highlighted cells by the separator chosen
If you’re a Microsoft Excel user, text to column works similar in Google Sheets except in Excel what is seperating your data it is called a delimiter instead of a seperator
How to Use the Split Function
1. Select the cell where you want the split data to start and type Split with your keyboard and then press Tab
2. Select the cell that you want to split and type a comma with your keyboard
3. The next step is to enter the delimiter of your data in between quotation marks. In our example, we are splitting the data on the commas, so inside the quotation marks, we have a comma. Add a closing parenthesis after this step to complete the formula
4. Press Enter on your keyboard and your data will split based on the separator you have chosen
5. If you have more data you want to split, you can simply click on the cell with your formula and copy it and paste it down to the other rows
6. This will repeat this same formula and split all the rows
The split formula has two basic arguments Split(text, delimiter) text = what are you splitting, delimeter = what are you splitting by
Closing Thoughts
Those are the two basic ways to split data. You can split data that is separated by anything, though in the examples we just showed spaces and commas.
If you’re confused about any of these steps be sure to watch the video at the top of the page and this should clear things up for you!
More Google Sheets Tutorials:
How to Combine Two Cells Into One
How to Do Basic Math Equations
How to Merge and Unmerge Cells
How to Extract Numbers of Text from a String