Working with Data in Text Files
Excel can read data in fixed-width as well as delimited text files. (A delimited file is one that uses some particular character or combination of characters to mark the boundaries between fields. A fixed-width file is one that uses space characters—as many as necessary—to achieve field alignment.) You can either open a text file (by clicking the Microsoft Office Button and clicking Open) or import it (by clicking the Data tab and then clicking From Text in the Get External Data group). If you want to be able to maintain a refreshable link to the source file, you need to do the latter.
When you open a comma-separated-values (.csv) file, Excel parses the data immediately into columns. If you open or import any other ...
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