vba courses london - Seperating text strings from one to two columns | VBA forum

did you know there is actually a function for this: for example

lets say you have a database of 4000 songs all in column A.

ie, animals - house of the rising sun

you wanted to replace the hyphens for a column.

Denis replied with this solution

Highlight all of your cells with the data.


Select the topmost cell in the column, e.g. A1
Hold CTRL+SHIFT and then press the down arrow.
OK, once we've done that, go to "Data" menu and select "Text To Columns".
On the Text To Columns window, select "Delimited" and then hit "Next".
In the following window, choose "other" for type of delimiter and use the minus/hyphen sign -
Hit Finish.

Now you will have two columns, from your example, the first column will contain data like "Animals" and the other column will contain the data " House of The Rising Sun". (note the SPACE in front of "House")

To get rid of that SPACE we're going to use the TRIM function.

In cell C1 (or the column to the right of the song titles) type in this formula.

=TRIM(B1)

Then double-click on that little black box on the excel cursor to copy the formula down the whole range. Any spaces at the start or end of the text string will be removed.