4 ms·

Seems like a lot more work than doing Data > Text to Columns :)

• II2II 5y ago
  As someone who has been handling delimited text for decades, Text to Columns is the most natural approach. That being said, different people have different backgrounds and approach problems from different angles. Flash Fill may be more appropriate in their cases.
  • sumitgulwani 5y ago
    Yes, text to Columns would work well for splitting tasks in a very uniform dataset. However, if you want to extract say Lastname from a column containing names some of which may have middle names (i.e., the dataset is not very uniform), then text to columns would not work correctly. Also, if you would like to do more than substring extraction, say convert "FirstName LastName" into "f.l." or "lastname, firstname", then Text2Columns won't be sufficient by itself. You would need to do more post-processing or would need a more sophisticated scripting capability.