Moving the House Number to Its Own Cell

Tom works with a lot of lists of addresses. One thing that drives him crazy is when the street address is in a single cell. Tom needs the house number in one cell and the street in a different cell. So, if the address is "1234 Maple Glen Ave.," then he needs "1234" in one cell and "Maple Glen Ave." in another. He can copy the house number into a column placed before the street name but it's a long process to retype the numbers and then eliminate them from the street name. Tom wonders if there is a simpler way that would "split" the house number from the street name.

There are a couple of ways you can go about this task. Some might think that using the Text to Columns tool (on the Data tab of the ribbon) would give the desired results. Unfortunately, it is not the best way to go about separating out the house number. The reason is simple: If you use the tool by specifying a delimiter, the only one that makes any sense is the space. But if you do that, you end up with "1234 Maple Glen Ave." being spread across four columns instead of the desired two. You would then need to come up with a way to paste the street name back together.

The other way to potentially use the Text to Columns tool is with a fixed column width (instead of a delimiter). This approach will work only if all your addresses have the same number of digits in the house number. In most data sets, of course, this won't be the case—house numbers could be just about any number of digits, and they might even include non-numeric characters (such as "1234A", "1234-B", or "1234-36").

One approach that will work is to use formulas to pull apart the original addresses. Your formulas can key in on the first space in the address, returning either the part to the left of the space or the part to the right. Here is the way to pull out everything before the space, given an address in cell A1:

=LEFT(A1,FIND(" ",A1)-1)

If you are absolutely certain that the addresses won't contain any non-numeric characters, you could wrap the formula in the VALUE function so that you end up with the house number as a numeric value:

=VALUE(LEFT(A1,FIND(" ",A1)-1))

To grab the part of the address following the first space you can use this formula:

=MID(A1,FIND(" ",A1)+1,LEN(A1))

You could, if you prefer, devise a formula that references the house number you pulled out with the first formula. Assume, for example, that your house-number formula is in column B; you could place the following in column C:

=TRIM(SUBSTITUTE(A1,B1,))

With your formulas in columns B and C (and the addresses in column A), you could copy the formulas down for however many rows necessary. Then you can select that B:C range and use Paste Special to paste the values back into those cells. After doing this you can safely delete the original addresses in column A.

If you often have to do many addresses, you might be better served to use a macro to do the pulling apart. The following example macro works on whatever range you have selected when you run it. It inserts a column of blank cells to the left of the selection, stuffs those cells with the house number, and then adjusts the addresses so the house number is no longer included.

Sub SplitAddress()
    Dim c As Range
    Dim j As Integer
    Dim n As String
    Dim addr As String

    Selection.Insert Shift:=xlToRight
    Selection.Offset(0, 1).Select

    For Each c In Selection
        j = InStr(1, c, " ")
        n = Left(c, j)
        c.Offset(0, -1) = n
        addr = Trim(Right(c, Len(c) - j))
        c = addr
    Next
End Sub

If you prefer, you could create a user-defined function that returns just the house number:

Function GrabHouseNumber(Raw As String) As String
    Dim x As Variant
    Dim House As Variant

    x = Split(Raw, " ")     'use space char to split elements into array
    House = x(0)   'first element of array
    If Left(House, 1) Like "#" Then
        'First char is numeric digit
        GrabHouseNumber = House  'set return value as house number
    Else
        GrabHouseNumber = ""  'First char is text, so not a house number
    End If
End Function

An advantage to using the user-defined function is that it checks to see if the first part of the original address actually starts with a number or not. If it doesn't, then it assumes that the address doesn't start with a house number. (The entire house number doesn't need to be numeric; it just needs to start with a digit.)

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