Accessing Text Files

Microsoft Excel provides two ways to access external data that's in the form of a text file: the Text Import Wizard and the OpenText method.

You can import delimited or fixed-width text files into a worksheet by using the Text Import Wizard. This wizard allows you to tell Microsoft Excel what form your data is in, specify how you want to distribute the text across columns, and choose the data format for each column.

To open the Text Import Wizard

1. On the File menu, click Open.

2. Click the name of the text file you want to import.

3. Click Open.

You can also use the OpenText method to load and parse a text file. This method creates a new workbook with a single worksheet containing the parsed text file data. For more information about the OpenText method, see "OpenText method" in Help.