Welcome to Change Your Life with Excel, bringing you another couple of doses of Excel trickery to help you save time and finish work earlier. In this edition we look at some techniques to split (or parse) cell values into 2 or more separate cells. This can be useful if for example you have each full staff name in a single cell but need to split them into first and last names. One of these techniques will introduce you to a couple of text functions which can be combined to do some very clever parsing. As always, the features covered here are based on Excel 2003 however most can still be found in other versions. For more information, please contact +61 2 9080 4050, edinfo@iir.com.au , or visit: http://bit.ly/iired

1. E-TIPS
Finance, Valuation, Risk & Modelling
your one-partner solution for building skills and knowledge
Change Your Life with Excel
Getting Clever with Words
elcome to Change Your Life with Excel, bringing
you another couple of doses of Excel trickery to
help you save time and finish work earlier.
In this edition we look at some techniques to split (or
parse) cell values into 2 or more separate cells. This can
be useful if for example you have each full staff name in
a single cell but need to split them into first and last
names. One of these techniques will introduce you to a
couple of text functions which can be combined to do
some very clever parsing.
As always, the features covered here are based on Excel
2003 however most can still be found in other versions.
Tip
Using Text to Columns
Some of you may unwittingly be familiar with the Text to
Columns feature if you’ve ever opened a text file in Excel.
A series of Text Import dialog boxes appears which is
identical to the Text to Columns dialog boxes.
To illustrate how Text to Columns works let’s assume
that we have a column of dates which need separating
into day, month and year.
• Select the column containing the dates
• From the Menu Bar select Data | Text to
Columns
A Text to Columns dialog box appears which first asks
whether our data is Delimited or Fixed Width.
Delimited means that there is a common character or
symbol which separates the items we want to split.
Fixed Width means that we could draw a vertical line
down the column to separate the items we want to split.
• Select Delimited since the items we want to split
are not perfectly vertically aligned
• Click Next
Determine what character or symbol splits each item to
be separated (this could be a space or a tab for
example).
Here we can see that a “/” splits the days, months and
years. Since this is not a predefined option we need to
tell Excel that this is our Delimiter.
• Tick Other and enter a “/” in the adjacent box
Notice in the Data preview pane how the days, months
and years are now neatly split
• Click Next
By default Excel will overwrite the original column of
complete dates. If we want to preserve this column we
may want to split the days, months and years into
columns B, C and D. To do this:
• Enter cell reference B1 into the Destination field
• Click Finish
We now have our dates split into separate cells as
required. Note how the “/” character has disappeared
since this was used as the Delimiter.
W
By Leigh Drake
Director
Arc Business Processes
www.arcbusiness.com.au

2. E-TIPS
Finance, Valuation, Risk & Modelling
your one-partner solution for building skills and knowledge
Note that you may need to reformat the numbers in
column A.
We can also use this feature to easily split text. For
example the names below can be split into first and last
names by ticking the Space option as a Delimiter in the
2
nd
step of the Text to Columns feature.
Trick
Extract Words from a String of Text
Suppose we have a list of names or other text and we
want to separate out, say, every first and last word. Doing
this manually on anything but a short list would be very
time consuming. Instead we can combine 2 functions,
SUBSTITUTE and LEN to do this in seconds.
The example we will use shows various product items
which comprise a product code, description and colour
which we want to split into 3 columns.
Since each description can comprise a different number
of words which we need to keep together, we can’t
simply use the Text to Columns feature above.
This is a 5-step process. Steps 1 to 4 will insert a unique
character immediately after the first word and
immediately before the last word. Step 5 will then use
Text to Columns to split the text using the unique
character as a Delimiter.
Step 1
• In cell B2 type the function
=SUBSTITUTE(A2,“ ”,“*”,1)
This function says:
- reference the text in cell A2, and
- replace each space (denoted by “ ”, a space
enclosed by 2 double quotes),
- with an asterisk (denoted by “*”), but
- only replace the first instance of a space
(denoted by the 1)
The asterisk is our unique character which will be our
Delimiter.
This converts the text
C45901 Copy Paper A3 Blue
to
C45901*Copy Paper A3 Blue
Step 2
Unfortunately there’s no easy way of telling Excel to now
find the last instance of a space so we have to apply a bit
of logic.
To help us do this we need to get rid of all remaining
spaces.
• In cell C2 type the function
= SUBSTITUTE(B2,“ ”,“”)

3. E-TIPS
Finance, Valuation, Risk & Modelling
your one-partner solution for building skills and knowledge
This says:
- reference the text in cell B2, and
- replace each space (denoted by “ ”, a space
enclosed by 2 double quotes),
- with nothing (denoted by “”, 2 double quotes)
By leaving the instance number blank, all remaining
spaces will be replaced.
This converts the text
C45901*Copy Paper A3 Blue
to
C45901*CopyPaperA3Blue
Step 3
• In cell D2 type the formula
=LEN(B2)-LEN(C2)
LEN counts the number of characters in a string of text
(including spaces). Therefore this formula subtracts the
number of characters in the text in cell C2 (22) from the
number of characters in the text in cell B2 (25). This tells
us the number of spaces remaining in the text in cell B2
(3)
Step 4
We can now insert an asterisk immediately before the
last word.
• In cell E2 type the function
=SUBSTITUTE(B2,“ ”,“*”,D2)
D2 in this case is 3 so this function replaces the 3
rd
instance of a space with an asterisk which results in the
text:
C45901*Copy Paper A3*Blue
• Copy the formulas in cells B2 to E2 to the end of
the list
• Highlight column E and select Edit | Copy
• With column E still highlighted select Edit |
Paste Special and select Values
• Click OK
This removes the formulas in column E
Step 5
• Highlight column E
• Use Text to Columns as above and use * as the
Delimiter
3 columns will be created containing the product code,
description and colour. Columns A to D can now be
deleted and we can add appropriate column titles. Phew!
Once you get the hang of this trick you’ll see how flexible
it can be and what could have taken hours now just takes
seconds. Don’t you just love Excel?
Until next time, happy Excelling.