In Excel, how to split the contents of one cell into several?

Question

In one cell I have a list separated by semicolons, like this:

item1;item2;item3;item4;item5

How can I split this into columns so that each item is in a separate cell - item1 is in A1, item2 is in B1, item3 in C1, and so on.

I figured it out... selected the entire column, then did "text to columns" and chose semicolon as delimiter.

Answer 1

focus on the cell,
then choose from the menu:
data - text to column
choose the "delimited" button, click next
choose the semicolon option and click finish...

Answer 2

if the data was imported from another file, then just set your delimiters to the appropriate punctuation
if you manually entered the data, then you have to manually seperate the data into its own cell.