Splitting Data from Cells

Hi All,
please be gentle!
I've got a column of data that I need to split out - annoyingly some of the cells have multiple entries & not all of them have usefully placed delimiters (,:; etc)
Weirdly (and annoyingly!) when I try to use 'text to columns' on a cell with clear delimiters, I seem to lose some of the data - not sure if this is because there are 'carriage returns' in the cells - I have used the trim function and I still seem to lose info - does trim not cope with carriage returns in cells?
hmm - this may be more than one problem!
any help gratefully received!!