text to column irritation

When I copy a text string it puts it into one column and I then do a text to column to parse out the data.  Then, when I copy multiple cells from another workbook to paste, excel pastes all the columns into one column instead of the multiple columns I've copied.  The only way I've found to fix this is close excel completely and when I restart it, it'll now allow me to copy multiple columns and paste into that same number of columns.  Help me stop excel from doing this please.