Pasting from SQL Server Management Studio to Excel concatenates columns

sql-server-2008 concatenation paste
Great Kindness picture Great Kindness · Aug 16, 2012 · Viewed 48.3k times · Source

I'm trying to paste my query results from Mgmt Studio to Excel, but for whatever reason the columns in Mgmt Studio are concatenated into a single column when pasted into Excel.

This doesn't happen to any of my colleagues and we couldn't find any settings for changing this. Any ideas?

Answer

Gordon Linoff picture Gordon Linoff · Aug 17, 2012

This is an issue with Excel.

After you paste the results into Excel, go to the "data" option and choose "Text to Columns". Then click on "delimited" and be sure that "tab" is checked on the next window.

This will convert the data into columns. And, Excel remembers the settings, so it will paste correctly the next time.

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