Excel text to columns feature

[oscarlimerick]

Hi folks, I thought I understood the text to columns feature but I guess I don't. I have attached a spreadsheet with a column A that contains an album name and the date it was released. I want to seperate this into 2 columns, column A being the album name and column B the album release date. I thiught I could just select the cells and click on text to columns, and then use "-" as the delimiter but this isn't working for me. Any advice here? Many thanks

[Guessed]

There are different types of dashs. The one in your sample appears to be an m-dash. Try copying one of those characters to your clipboard and then paste that into the 'Other' character field when choosing a Delimiter.

[oscarlimerick]

Hello, I don't know what an m-dash character is, or where to findit on my keyboard, I tried everything that looked like a hyjhen and nothing worked, then I copied it from the column A cell and pasted into the delimeter field and it worked fine. Thanks for your help! I will mark this thread resolved.

[Pecoflyer]

FYI How to Type an En Dash and Em Dash on Windows and Mac Devices | Proofed's Writing Tips

[oscarlimerick]

Good to know, thanks for the link

[Alansidman]

if you use Power Query in the User Interface the em dash is automatically identified in this Mcode

let
    Source = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="Table1"]}[Content],
    #"Split Column by Delimiter" = Table.SplitColumn(Source, "Column1", Splitter.SplitTextByDelimiter("—", QuoteStyle.Csv), {"Column1.1", "Column1.2"})
in
    #"Split Column by Delimiter"