How to Split Excel Data into Multiple Columns Without Getting It All Jumbled Up

Suppose you’ve asked someone for some information. You were hoping for a nice, neat table, but what they’ve sent you back is, well, messy. Maybe the columns aren’t broken up the way you expected. Or maybe you don’t even have any columns, and it’s just several rows of information pasted into an email.

If you need to sort your data, run a mail merge, or do anything useful with this information, you’re going to have to clean it up first. Fortunately, Excel has a tool for just this type of problem: Text to Columns.

Let’s take a look at how to use that tool along with the Find/Replace feature to organize a stubborn set of data.

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How to Combine Related Data from Multiple Spreadsheets

Imagine you have multiple tables of information, each serving a particular purpose, but one day, you need to somehow splice these tables together. Not only are those tables huge, but they’re not the same size, so copying and pasting the data would take forever.

What if there were a function that could do all of this for you?

What if I told you there IS a function that could do all of this for you?

I’m talking about VLOOKUP!

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