Pasting from SQL Server Management Studio to Excel concatenates columns

I had the exact same problem. Yesterday it worked, but today it just pasted everything into the first column as text. Used to automatically be pasted from the Management Studio columns into Excel columns.

It's Excel. It remembers your text-to-column choices from last time you used the function in Excel and applies them automatically next time you copy-paste.

You can indeed just use the text-to-columns function again with tabs selected as delimiter. Then after that this choice is remembered and stored in Excel. Now if you copy from Management Studio again and paste it will snap into the columns as expected.

Seems it's one of those instances where Excel tries to help you but ends up being a bit annoying :)

This is an issue with Excel.

After you paste the results into Excel, go to the "data" option and choose "Text to Columns". Then click on "delimited" and be sure that "tab" is checked on the next window.

This will convert the data into columns. And, Excel remembers the settings, so it will paste correctly the next time.

I have solved this problem in my SSMSBoost add-in for SSMS: it has possibility to export grid as native OpenXMLSpreadsheet, which can be easily "understood" by excel. As "bonus" to solution of your problem you will also see that even datatypes are preserved, so no problems anymore with conversion of dates to text or text to numbers... Check it out.