Step 1: Standardize (The "Clean Up" Phase) - Use a Text Editor
The secret to easy conversion is consistency. Each distinct piece of information you want in a separate column needs to be identifiable and appear in a predictable way across all your list items.
Identify Your "Fields" (Future Columns): Look at a few entries and decide what distinct pieces of information you want to extract. In our example: "Customer Name", "Topic/Subject/Issue", "Date", "Status".
Choose a Consistent Separator (Delimiter): Pick a single character or short sequence of characters that brother cell phone list not appear anywhere else within your data. Good choices are a pipe (|), a tilde (~), or even ###. A comma (,) can work if your data itself doesn't contain commas within a single field. Let's choose | for this example.
Use "Find and Replace" to Standardize: This is the most crucial part. You'll use the text editor's "Find and Replace" function (usually Ctrl+H on Windows, Cmd+H on Mac) to make everything consistent.
Goal: Replace all the varying text labels and separators with just your chosen delimiter (|).
Example Find and Replace operations for our data:
Find: Inquiry from: Replace with: (leave blank, or just | if you want a blank column to delete later)
Find: Query by: Replace with: (leave blank)
Find: Customer message: Replace with: (leave blank.