Excel Data Entry Shortcut
You can use this one simple trick to be able to work on and using a csv or XLSX file to be used in your mailing list. Have you ever had a column of text where you had both the First name and last name in the same exact column well no need to worry! Excel can easily turn 3 - 8 hours of manual labor into 2 clicks worth of work and a snap of your finger. Its very handy for everyone to know how to do it.
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This is very useful for data entry with email lists that maybe setup wrong and needing to be able to setup
Things to take note of
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This works in Excel 2003 - 2013 and current versions forward
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Names that have 3 - 4 words in them will be added to neighboring columns. An Example of this would be "John Smith Saint Jr." would take 4 columns instead of only 2 for the First and Last names. Excel doesn't know what's a First Name or a Last Name anything that is divided by a space is made into a column.
While editing your document have a column where you have a First name & Last name. It doesn't matter currently if all of the first and last name is all in one column because we are here to make the column that has the first and last name in one column be broken out into 2 columns.
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First click the "Data" tab along the top where you find "Home, Insert, Page Layout, and etc..."
Delimited this is how Excel is reading the text thats within your document, this is selected by default. just press "next".
This is going to be what tells Excel how to split your 1 column filled with both first and last names into 2 columns. You want to deselect "tab" and select "space" at this prompt.
This is just showing you that Excel was able to correctly read the data. If you want you can just also select "text" but it doesn't really do anything currently because we are currently dealing with data that doesn't have anything to deal with "date and time" so leaving it on "general" is also fine cause Excel is able to define the difference between if there's "date and time" data versus "text" data.
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Just press "finish".
You did it!
You have now completed the data entry correction that only took a little bit work and has now made your life whole a bunch easier! wasn't 2 clicks but still a lot better than 3 - 8 hours worth of data entry that could take you forever! If you didn't know this easy trick to save you a bunch of time why ask yourself why would you want to cut and paste each last name into a new column for about 300+ lines of names think of all that work!
Learn more about this tutorial
It's not everyday that you sit down and edit CSV files in excel but, I created this tutorial because of the fact this was an issue I experienced and I was able to think about how excel manages data very well. I have seen recently a few youtube shorts where there where people showing others how to make custom formulas and how to turn manual labor jobs for data entry in to 5 second work in just a few clicks. Excel is relatively straight forward I started clicking each of the tabs and I landed on data, and then I saw a button that said "text to columns" and with in no time I was like wow lets see what it does and with in no time with me having to clean up some old CSV's for a client's old email marketing list it was really able to help aid me in saving so much time! and I thought wow! People should really have a bit of access to this for how easy it is.