Copying the Contents of a Cell to the Bottom of the Column

I find it really annoying when I'm working in a large spreadsheet and have to copy a formula that I just entered all of the way down to the bottom of the column. Mind you, this isn't much of a problem if the spreadsheet only goes down to the bottom of the screen, but I often work with spreadsheets that contain information on students in multiple buildings; this can mean that I'm dealing with thousands of rows of information. Having to click on the "auto fill" cursor (you know, the little plus sign in the lower right hand of the cell) and drag down through thousands of rows can be a real pain...if only there were an easier way.

How To Join Multiple Cells In A Spreadsheet.

In my last post, I showed you how to take information from one cell and split it into two different cells. In this post, I'm going to show you how to take multiple cells and combine their data into one cell.

There are a couple of ways to merge the cells, but they are both based on the concatenate feature. When you concatenating things, you are linking, or joining them together. In the example that we'll be looking at today, we're going to be taking lists of student first and last names that we have in different cells and putting them together in a different cell.

How To Split Cells In A Spreadsheet

Have you ever had a spreadsheet where you'd really like to split a cell that contains multiple data points (last name, first name) into individual cells with only one data point each? I know that I used to use this a lot for taking my class roster and separating the last and first names. Today I'm going to show you how to use the Text to Columns feature, in both Google Sheets, and Microsoft Excel to do just that.

Google Sheets:

As you might expect, with Google Sheets generally being a simplified version of Excel, the process of splitting text to columns is fairly simple.

1. Right click on the column to the right of the column that contains the text you'd like to split.
2. Choose the option Insert 1 left; you're going to need to do this for each additional word. Since I will end up with two separate words in this example, I only need to do this step once as I only need one extra cell.
3. Highlight the cells that you want to split.
4. Click the Data heading from the toolbar.
5. Click Split text to columns. This will take the first name and place it into the second column that you just added.