Pasting into Excel splits data into columns

I noticed this week that every time I past  URL into excel, it would split it on the first colon (i.e. after the http portion) and split it across two cells. Obviously I don’t want it to do this, and I recalled this happening with some other data in the paste as well. Trying to format the columns didnt change anything, so why is this happening? 

The fix is this: paste something into a cell, then to the “text to columns” operation. Look at the delimiters specified for this feature- in my case, I had apparently entered a “:” earlier that I was using to try to parse some data. Apparently every time you paste text into excel, it tries to use these rules to determine if the data should be split across multiple columns or not. This is also the reason you can usually paste tab delimited text and it splits it out the way you want it- the tab is usually selected as a delimiter in the text to columns configuration. 

Hope this can help ease someone else’s frustration.