• Use ; then, near the bottom of the dialog box, select Text Files from the Files of Type drop down list, the go to the folder where the data file is located and select it.
• Excel then starts the Text import wizard
• Note that the same facility is also available to create data columns from a text column () When you read in text data, It might happen that all data for an observation ends up in a single column, as Excel was not able to create separate columns for each variable (e.g. you did not specify the correct column separator or you had to add one within Excel. creates these data columns using the same Text Import Wizard that this document describes in some detail. If you have several text columns to convert to data, you will have to do it for each text column; this is of course quite handy in more complex situations with different delimiters that could not be specified simultaneously.

If your file is a delimited file, select Delimited, otherwise select Fixed width for a fixed format file; then click Next.

As the delimiter in the example file is the TAB character Excel has automatically found the data columns, as visible at the bottom showing a preview of what Excel found. If this is not the case you can select the delimiters used in your file the file and the preview will be adapted automatically (for the first lines of the text file).

Finally the step lets you modify the data formats of the columns that will be read in. Except for very small files, it is often more convenient to let Excel read the file, and change the data format using the Excel menu, if needed. In addition you will be able to see the full spreadsheet, not only the first line, i.e. a sheet you should inspect anyway to find out whether everything was imported as expected.

In Excel every observation has to be on a single line and cannot span several lines (records).

Select Fixed width, if Excel did no select it automatically, note the preview at the bottom of the dialog.

In the next step you will see how Excel has divided every line into fixed columns.

As in the original file not all columns were separated by a blank, the columns are not correct for all data columns you wish to read in.

You can correct this by adding, deleting or moving the column break arrows, until they correspond to the data.