Use Excel’s Text-to-Columns Tool to Quickly Correct Date Entries

The Text-to-Columns tool in Excel is one of my favorites. I use it to quickly “parse” text elements in a cell. For example, to separate “First Name” from Last Name in a cell that contains the “Full Name” entry.

In this short – 3 minute, 23 seconds – video, I demonstrate another way to use Text-to-Columns. I show you how to separate the “Year,” the “Month” and the “Day.” A client called me in a panic – they downloaded daily transactions from their mainframe computer into Excel. However, the “dates” appeared as – e.g. 20100901 – and they could not find a way to format the dates as – e.g. 9/1/2010

Learn how to “Master Excel in Minutes – Not Months!”

How to Use Excel’s Transpose and Text to Columns Tools to Reorganize Your Data

This video lesson is in response to a viewer’s request. The information that he gets comes from a mainframe computer and the orientation of the data is horizontal (going left-to-right across columns. He wants to be able to reorganize this data to show it vertically (from top-to-bottom in rows. I use Excel’s Transpose tool to show him how to do this.

I also demonstrate an extremely useful Excel Tool – Text to Columns – to break apart an address block (City, State, Postal Code) into discrete fields – to help you to manage a mail merge or to sort and filter by State or by Postal Code.

(Note: Somehow this lesson “got lost” as I was reorganizing my website. So, I apologize in advance if you already viewed this lesson.)

If you enjoyed this lesson, I invite you to visit my online bookstore to shop for my DVD, “The 50 Best Tips for Excel 2007.” It is on sale now!

You can watch this Excel Video Lesson on YouTube – vist my channel – DannyRocksExcels

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