Tab delimited text file import on double click

[Robert Just]

Greetings

I have tab delimited text files containing data.
The first 30 lines are header lines and do not have tabs and have spaces
between words.
The following lines have tab delimited columns.
These files have .xls extensions though they are really only text files.

In the past with excel 2003 SP1 I could double click one of these files in
windows explorer and it would open in excel correctly parsed.

With excel 2003 SP3 if I double click on one of these files it opens in
excel but is not correctly parsed. It appears to have used fixed length
rather then tab delimited to import the file.

I can do a file open in excel and set the import wizard to delimited and it
opens parsed correctly.

However I like to be able to simply double click.

If I reduce the number of header lines to 20 or so double clicking works.
However I need these header lines.

Is there a way to change the behavior of excel in this regard. Perhaps
change the number of lines it samples to determine delimited or fixed length?
I've looked in the options dialog and around on the internet and have found
no suggestions.

Thanks

 

[Jim Cone]

Robert,
Take a look at this post...
http://tinyurl.com/37dvav
--
Jim Cone
San Francisco, USA
http://www.realezsites.com/bus/primitivesoftware
(Excel Add-ins / Excel Programming)



"Robert Just"
wrote in message
Greetings
I have tab delimited text files containing data.
The first 30 lines are header lines and do not have tabs and have spaces
between words.
The following lines have tab delimited columns.
These files have .xls extensions though they are really only text files.

In the past with excel 2003 SP1 I could double click one of these files in
windows explorer and it would open in excel correctly parsed.

With excel 2003 SP3 if I double click on one of these files it opens in
excel but is not correctly parsed. It appears to have used fixed length
rather then tab delimited to import the file.

I can do a file open in excel and set the import wizard to delimited and it
opens parsed correctly.

However I like to be able to simply double click.

If I reduce the number of header lines to 20 or so double clicking works.
However I need these header lines.

Is there a way to change the behavior of excel in this regard. Perhaps
change the number of lines it samples to determine delimited or fixed length?
I've looked in the options dialog and around on the internet and have found
no suggestions.
Thanks

 

[Robert Just]

Jim

Thanks for leading me to the information.

The shift with file open is interesting and better then using the wizard
everytime. But I fear the 'users' will whine. (I'm kidding users)

And in my environment I might have trouble with removing a security update.

But we'll see.

Robert Just