Separate Your Cells

Separate Your Cells

Add a Separator

• Open Find and Replace:

  • Press ctrl + f (on PC) or cmd + f (on Mac)

  • A search box should appear in the top right of your screen. Click on the More options button to the right of the search box (three vertical dots). A box labeled Find and replace will appear in the middle of your screen.

• In the Find box, enter the initials or name of the first speaker (ex. RS or Rebecca Scofield)
  • If you include a colon (:) after the name or initials, include that in the find box as well
• In the Replace box, enter what you put in the Find box above, plus an asterisk (*) (ex. RS*). I
  • If there was a colon included, remove the colon and replace it with an asterisk (*).

• Click the Replace all button. Then click Done

• Repeat the steps above for the initials of the second speaker and the speakers’ full names

• Your spreadsheet should now look like this:

Separate Your Cells (Split Text to Columns)

• If they aren’t selected already, select the cells you just pasted, so that your sheet looks like this:

• Click on Data > Split Text to Columns

• A little box labeled Separator: will appear near the bottom of your screen. Click on the arrows to the right of Detect Automatically

• Select Custom from the list of choices that appears.

• A box should appear labeled Custom separator

• Enter an asterisk (*) followed by a space ( ) into this box.

Make sure your asterisk is followed by a space! Otherwise your transcript might not work right for the website.

• The text should separate into a new column automatically: