Excel column split & merge

How to use it

1. Paste your table into the box — copy the range straight out of Excel, the clipboard is already tab-separated. The columns appear as a strip of chips under it immediately, and the result is already below: no button to press.
2. Pick the operation: “Split one column” cuts the column you click into as many columns as the widest row needs; “Merge columns” joins the columns you tick, in the order you tick them (the number on each chip is that order).
3. Choose the delimiter or the connector. The split delimiter is detected for you, and the list of choices follows the language of this page — Chinese pages offer the ideographic comma and the enumeration comma, Arabic pages offer the Arabic comma and semicolon. Copy or download the result; it keeps the delimiter and line endings of your input.

Example

order_id,full_name,address
1001,"Popescu, Ana","Berlin|Mitte|10115"
1002,Ben Carter,"Dublin|Leinster|D02"
1003,"Chen, Wei","Shanghai|Pudong|200120"

order_id,full_name,address,address_1,address_2,address_3
1001,"Popescu, Ana",Berlin|Mitte|10115,Berlin,Mitte,10115
1002,Ben Carter,Dublin|Leinster|D02,Dublin,Leinster,D02
1003,"Chen, Wei",Shanghai|Pudong|200120,Shanghai,Pudong,200120

Four things to check in that output: the address column was picked for you because it is the one where a delimiter actually shows up, and the note says so; the number of new columns is set by the widest row, so a table whose rows split into different counts still lines up and the notice names the padded rows; “Popescu, Ana” keeps its quotes because the comma is inside the value, while “Berlin|Mitte|10115” needs none; and the source column stays by default, so the counter reads columns 3 → 6 rather than 3 → 5.

Rules, limits and known issues

• Nothing is uploaded: the text is parsed, reshaped and redrawn in this page only. There is no file upload, no drag-and-drop and no URL fetch — paste the text. To open a local .csv (especially GB18030, Big5 or Windows-1256 encoded) or an .xlsx file, use the CSV viewer or the Excel duplicate remover and copy the text from there.
• Both operations change the shape of the table only. Every cell value passes through untouched: 89.90 stays 89.90, 00721 keeps its leading zero, 03/04/2026 is not parsed, and no full-width/half-width or case normalisation is done — the text cleaner covers that.
• By default nothing is removed: the source column is kept when splitting and kept when merging (the merged column is appended at the end). Tick “Keep source column” off, or “Remove source columns” on, if you want the shorter table. The column counter always shows both numbers.
• Splitting: the delimiter is matched literally, so regular-expression characters such as | or * mean themselves. Parts are trimmed by default — including full-width spaces, non-breaking spaces and zero-width characters, but not direction marks, which are part of Arabic text. Empty parts are kept by default, because dropping them would quietly change what position 2 means; tick “Drop empty parts” if you want them gone. Long rows are capped at 64 new columns and the overflow is joined back into the last one, so no character is lost — the notice names the rows it touched.
• Merging: empty cells are skipped by default so you never get a double connector, and the notice says how many were skipped. A cell holding 0 is a value, not an empty cell, and is never skipped. The order you tick the chips in is the order they are joined in; it is not the order of the output columns, which stay as they are.
• Input is capped at 1,000,000 characters; above 200,000 the result waits until you stop typing and tells you. Malformed CSV is never rejected: an unclosed quote is folded to the end of the text and its row is named, blank lines are skipped and counted, rows with a different field count are listed. If no delimiter is found in the chosen column, the output is the same table you pasted.
• The output has no byte-order mark and no trailing newline, and it is identical to what you copy. Fields are quoted only when they contain the delimiter, a quote or a line break, so a field that was quoted in your input may come out unquoted.
• Out of scope: custom multi-character delimiters, regular expressions, splitting by position, template merging, reordering or renaming existing columns, de-duplication, undo and multi-step pipelines — the CSV column cleaner, the CSV viewer, the Excel duplicate remover and the text cleaner cover those.

Related tools

Neighbouring steps on the same table: read it, tidy it, reshape it.