Notepad to Excel paste

Write any thing in one cell in excel. Now select this data and go to Text to Columns.

It will open Convert text to column wizard, select Tab delimited. Now in step 2 of wizard Uncheck the radio button of delimiters ( if any ) and then finish.

Now copy your data from Notepad and paste it. It will not broke it in to multiple columns.

The catch is that last delimiter selected in wizard is by defaulted applied to data, If you remove it then it will not delimit the data.

1. Open Excel to a blank worksheet.
2. Type anything into A1; e.g. ;dkhgf
3. With A1 selected, choose Data, Text to Columns.
4. Select Delimited from the first set of option then Next.
5. Turn off all delimiters and click Finish.
6. Erase the random cell contents from A1.
7. Go to Notepad and tap Cltr+A (aka Select All) then Ctrl+C (aka Copy).
8. Back at Excel, right-click the destination cell and choose Paste, Keep Text only icon.

Excel 'remembers' previous Text to Columns settings and attempts to use them when you paste copied text into a worksheet. If you have any tabs (ASCII 009) in the original text, Excel will not display them but they will interfere with data manipulation.

Addendum: if you have played around with line feeds in the original text, they will break to a new line. Not much can be done about that.

Addendum²: this reply largely duplicates the one from V_Agarwal above; it just got posted 1½ minutes later. I'm leaving it here instead of removing it as I believe there are a couple of salient points that add to the discussion.

An example of the data in notepad would help because I can copy from notepad to excel and it always copies into one cell so maybe your data is in a different format.

Having said that, you can use the import feature of Excel as follows:

1. Select the cell on the worksheet where you want the data to start
2. Select Data ribbon
3. In the "Get external data" block at the left select "From text"
4. In the dialog that opens browse to and open the required text document.
5. In new dialog Select Fixed width (if not already selected) and click Next
6. In the data preview remove the data separator lines. (Either double click on the line or click on the line and drag off the pane)
7. You can also add delimiters by simply clicking at any position plus you can click on any separator and drag to new location.

If you only want some of the data from your text file then you could copy required data to a new notepad file and then do the above. Alternatively save the notepad file to a new name and edit out the data not required.

Hope this helps.