How Do I Get a Text-Based Report Into Excel

If a program can output a delimited text file (I’ll get to what that means in a minute), Excel can turn it into a reasonable table.

Of course, the text has to be properly prepared. Every line in that file will become a spreadsheet row–that’s pretty easy. But you need markers,

called delimiters, to tell Excel where to break the rows into columns. Excel can recognize tabs, spaces, semicolons, or commas as delimiters, and you can assign other characters, as well. You can also add quotation marks to better clarify the separation.

Excel can also use fixed-width fields to separate your rows into columns. In this option, for instance, you might say that the first column starts with the first character in the line, the second with the eighth character, and so on.

To load your file into Excel, select Open from the File

menu or click the Open icon, select Text Files as your ‘Files of type’, and select your file. Excel will open the Text Import Wizard to walk you through the delimiter options.

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