Microsoft® Office Excel® 2003 Step by Step

Creating PivotTables from External Data

While most of the time you will create PivotTables from data stored in Excel worksheets, you can also bring data from outside sources into Excel. For example, you might need to work with data created in another spreadsheet program with a file format that Excel can’t read directly. Fortunately, you can transfer worksheets from one program to another by exporting the data from the original program into a text file, which Excel then translates into a worksheet.

Spreadsheet programs store data in cells, so the goal of representing spreadsheet data in a text file is to indicate where the contents of one cell end ...