Importing Data without 'help'

[Brian Dellinger @ Dartmouth College]

Hi all.

My office downloads a dataset (tab delimited) that we
process for insertion into a database (Oracle).

The vendor who provides us the data hasn't done a great
job of data scrubbing, so we need to go in and make some
changes to the file in order to input it cleanly. Excel
makes it easy to do this by allowing us to select specfic
columns and replace illegal characters, etc.

The trick is that Excel also *automatically* reformats
several columns for us (dropping leading zeros from
dates, zip codes, etc) ... This means we have to touch
even *more* fields.

Is there a way to instruct excel to open a particular
file 'as it is' and not apply any other formatting?

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[Jim Rech]

If the data file has an extension other than CSV Excel will open the Text
Import Wizard when you open the file. The third screen of the wizard lets
to set the format of each field. Pick Text for the fields that you do not
want reformatted.

 

[Guest]

Jim,

Oddly enough, the file is a .txt file (tab delimited) and
excel doesn't bring up the wizard.

That said, I can certainly rename the file to .fup or
something equally bizarre and invoke the wizard.

You ROCK!

 

[tjtjjtjt]

You might be able to force the Wizard to open by doing this
Open a blank workbook and go to Data|Import External Data
This works for me

tj