Export Cells with Commas in Tab Delim File

[Gil Anspacher]

I am working in Mac OS 10.3.2 and Excel X: When we have a cell with txt that
has a comma in the string like:

The dog, cat and mouse

And export as a tab delimited text file, excel puts quotes around the cell
content in the exported file:

³The dog, cat and mouse²

I have seen this in Excel 98, 2001 and now X, all on mac. As this text is
used for display in another app, the quotes can not be there. My work around
for now is to import the excel file into Filemaker Pro and then export from
there.

Is there a way around the excel export issue?

Thanks!
Gil

 

[Peo Sjoblom]

You can write your own VBA to do this or you can use something already
created.
I believe Earl Kiosterud's TextWrite utility has an option that will leave
quotations out

http://www.tushar-mehta.com/excel/software/text_write_program/text_write_program.zip

 

[Gil Anspacher]

This seem a bit more work than just going the Filemaker Pro route. So I
assume this a known issue with MS? Or they actually meant the program to
function this way?

Any other solutions?

Thanks!
Gil

 

[Peo Sjoblom]

MS works in mysterious ways

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q104/9/97.asp

a solution provided by them

 

[Gil Anspacher]

Hummm... I was not able to get this to work... It is an old article. I tried
taking the parts out and creating a macro with the parts, but it would not
compile. Any ideas?

 

[Gil Anspacher]

I found another way around this... But not with Excel :-(

I take the multi-worksheet excel doc that my client sends me and import it
into Mariner Calc (another spreadsheet program)
http://marinersoftware.com/siteproduct.php?product=calc
And Calc exports without the extra quotes.

But, it really would be nice if MS would fix this!

Gil

 

[Harlan Grove]

I found another way around this... But not with Excel :-(

I take the multi-worksheet excel doc that my client sends me and import it
into Mariner Calc (another spreadsheet program)
http://marinersoftware.com/siteproduct.php?product=calc
And Calc exports without the extra quotes.

But, it really would be nice if MS would fix this!

...

Unlikely Microsoft considers this a bug. I'd guess they use the same routine to
save files in CSV and tab-separated formats, changing only the field separator.
Makes a fair amount of sense to do so, though it does produce unseemly
tab-separated files.

Since you've mentioned you're using Mac OS 10 (X?), you have access to an
alternative way of handling this automatically. If you always save to the same
directory, you could use the Unix commandline utilities provided in OS X to run
sed at regular intervals to read .TXT files in that directory, filter out the
double quotes, and write the resulting files in a different directory.

Gil Anspacher at (e-mail address removed) wrote on 1/23/04 4:25 PM:

A solution, putatively for Excel 97, but written as an XLM macro?! Speaks rather
eloquently about their commitment to deal with this.

Does this mean Mac versions of Excel no longer support XLM macros?