Text to Columns

In short Splitting text into columns takes delimited text — separated by tabs, commas, semicolons or a custom character — and lays it out as aligned columns you can see before pasting into a spreadsheet. Previewing is the point. The most common data-import failure is picking the wrong delimiter and discovering afterwards that everything landed in one column, or that a comma inside a quoted field split a row in two. Seeing the grid first catches both. Tab-separated data is the format to prefer where you have a choice, because tabs almost never appear inside a field while commas appear inside addresses and names constantly. That is why copying from a spreadsheet gives you tabs rather than commas. Two things the preview will show you immediately if they are wrong: a row with more columns than the others, which usually means an unquoted delimiter inside a field, and a first row that is data rather than headers. Both are far easier to fix here than after the import.