By David Ringstrom, CPA
From time to time, you might copy a list of data in text format from a webpage, report screen, or other source to the Windows clipboard. In such cases, Excel 2010 offers a hidden shortcut that makes it easier to break such data into columns.
With text data on the clipboard, click the lower half of the Paste button on the Home tab, and then choose Use Text Import Wizard.
This feature allows you to parse delimited data into columns based on a separator, such as tab, semicolon, comma, space, or a single character of your choice. Or, you can choose Fixed Width and manually place column breaks where you need them. This saves the step of pasting data into a worksheet column and then manually launching the Text to Columns wizard on the Data tab of the ribbon.
A previous version of this article first appeared on www.accountingweb.com .
About the author:
David H. Ringstrom, CPA heads up Accounting Advisors, Inc., an Atlanta-based software and database consulting firm providing training and consulting services nationwide. Contact David at david@acctadv.com or follow him on Twitter. David speaks at conferences about Microsoft Excel, and presents webcasts for several CPE providers, including AccountingWEB partner CPE Link
