Excel 2003 unwanted automatic Text to Columns

[Hollie C]

For work I regularly open .txt files in Excel 2003 with the "Open with"
command. The files opens in Excel one line per cell and then I can seperate
out everything I need. Today I did that and it's decided to automatically do
text to columns! This would be ok if it didn't decide to cut numbers in half.
I don't know what/who turned this feature on but I need to turn it off and
can't find how.

I can't concatenate everything back together correctly because it has taken
liberties with leading spaces and what it thinks is leading 0s.

Thank you!

 

[Hollie C]

I am currently having to use the Data Imprt option but it is taking a lot
longer and for what I'm doing I can already see potentially big problems.

 

[Dave Peterson]

Excel likes to help by remembering the choices you've made on that dialog.

One way to make excel forget is to close excel and reopen it.

Another way is to run data|text to columns, choose delimited and uncheck all the
separators.

 

[Dave Peterson]

How about dropping the "open with" technique and just opening excel and using
File|Open?