Excel Tip: Pasting Text into Excel 2010

Excel expert David Ringstrom is sharing his tips for optimizing the way you use Excel in our new Excel Tips series.

By David Ringstrom, CPA

Fr om time to time, you might copy a list of data in text format fr om a webpage, report screen, or other source to the Windows clipboard. In such cases, Excel 2010 offers a hidden shortcut that makes it easier to break such data into columns.

With text data on the clipboard, click the lower half of the Paste button on the Home tab, and then choose Use Text Import Wizard.

This feature allows you to parse delim ited data into columns based on a separator, such as tab, semicolon, comma, space, or a single character of your choice. Or, you can choose Fixed Width and manually place column breaks wh ere you need them. This saves the step of pasting data into a worksheet column and then manually launching the Text to Columns wizard on the Data tab of the ribbon.