You can separate numbers from text in Excel, provided you specify what needs to be separated. Open Excel; Open the Excel file that contains the garbled data.

Numbers (and Excel) reads this as straight text. After importing, you can select the column and explicitly set it to text via the Format Inspector > Cell > Data Format , where you choose Text .

One might split first, last, and middle initial into three fields. ... where you drop in special characters or sequences to match parts of text, like any number (0 to 9) ...