This is an interesting question, but I'm not exactly sure what it is.



If the aim is to insert semicolons (or other character) in the raw data from the "suppose I have a program", prior to Excel getting the data, it's probably a question that should be asked of that particular program.

If the aim is to accept the raw data as is and have Excel manipulate it before placement of the data into cells, we would need to have an accurate sample of the data Excel is getting to work with. I emphasize accurate because if the data is now going into separate cells then the 12345 as you indicate would have a delimiting character between the individual digits.

Sorry, I was trying to be concise. The actual application is this. I have a plug-in to Photoshop Lightroom that exports EXIF data for each photograph selected from the library.The data is reported as a.TXT file. I can copy the TXT file and paste it onto an Excel spreadsheet. Problem is that The data is presented as a long string with multiple data sets, Each with identical, repeating fields. What I want to do is to separate that long row into columns.then I would put headings on each column for shutter speed, aperture etc. I was thinking that I could place a character like a ; after each repeating data set and have Excel parse that data from the row and place it into columns. I believe this is possible, but I don't know how to do it.