Can the opposite of Concatenate be used in Excel?

The opposite of Concatenate in Excel is the Split function. While Concatenate combines multiple cells or strings into one, Split separates a single cell or string into multiple cells based on a specified delimiter. Both functions are useful in manipulating data in Excel, but serve different purposes. Therefore, it is possible to use the opposite of Concatenate, which is Split, in Excel.

Excel: Use the Opposite of Concatenate


You can use the CONCATENATE function in Excel to join text from multiple cells into a single cell.

The opposite of this function is the TEXTSPLIT function, which can be used to split the text in one cell into multiple cells based on a specific delimiter.

For example, you can use the following formula to split the text in cell C2 into multiple cells based on where spaces occur in the cell:

=TEXTSPLIT(C2, " ")

The following example shows how to use this formula in practice.

Example: How to Use the Opposite of Concatenate in Excel

Suppose we have the following list of cities and team names for various basketball teams:

We could type the following formula into cell C2 to concatenate together the city and team name into one cell:

=CONCATENATE(A2," ",B2)

We could then click and drag this formula down to each remaining cell in column C:

Now if we would like to perform the opposite of concatenate, then we could type the following formula into cell D2 to split the text of each cell in column C into multiple cells based on spaces:

=TEXTSPLIT(C2, " ")

We could then click and drag this formula down to each remaining cell in column D:

Excel opposite of concatenate

The TEXTSPLIT function splits the text of each cell in column C into multiple cells based on where the space occurs.

Note #1: In this example there was only one space in each cell in column C, but the TEXTSPLIT function can work with any number of spaces in a given cell.

Note #2: You can find the complete documentation for the TEXTSPLIT function in Excel .

Additional Resources

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common operations in Excel:

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