Tom’s Tutorials For Excel: Parse a Cell’s Contents

Tom’s Tutorials For Excel: Parse a Cell’s Contents

If you ever need to parse a cell’s contents such that each character is displayed along the row in its own cell, here’s one way to do it.



In the picture, text items are listed in column A.
In cell B1 is the formula =MID($A1,COLUMN()-1,1) which has been copied down to cell B4.
Then, cells B1:B4 are copied and pasted as far to the right as needed to accommodate the length of the longest entry in column A.