Therefore, you should make sure that you leave an empty space on the right before splitting. So the new cells will overwrite the contents in the next cell on the right. It’s important to note that when you split the contents of a cell, Excel does not insert new cells to hold the contents. We now have two columns of data, with the first name in Column A and last name in Column B. Leave it with the General option selected and then click Finish. By default, the General option is selected, which ensures that the columns have the same format as the original cells.