Question : Stop excel from splitting imported text containing commas

Hi all

I am pasting text from the clipboard into an excel sheet. The text is crossword clues which often have commas in the sentence and at the end if there are two words in the answer e.g. (3,4). The problem is that when I paste the text excel treats the commas as delimiters and splits the sentences and letter counts into separate cells wherever there is a comma in the sentence. I want it to put the whole sentence in one cell, including the commas.

To make matters worse, it is doing this in one of the three worksheets, but not in the others. I have tried formatting the cells in the rogue sheet as text and general, but to no avail. I am using excel 2007, but the workbook is 2003.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards

Terry

Answer : Stop excel from splitting imported text containing commas

Have you tried 'Paste Special'>'Text'?

Alternatively, another workround would be to paste your text and allow excel to split it at the commas, and then use a concatenate formula to re-join the text into a single cell.

=trim(concatenate(a1," ",b1," ",c1))

The " " ensures that spaces are entered between each data element and the 'TRIM' removes any extra spaces