This is a particularly good solution if you find that your project involves working with identically formatted text all the time. After the wizard is complete, you can then simply delete the row.įinally, you can develop a Visual Basic routine to handle the data deconstruction for you. When you run the wizard, Excel won't be able to figure out where the breaks are in this data, so it doesn't venture any guesses. For instance, you might put in 200 X characters, with no spaces or punctuation. In the row, put a long string of characters with no spaces. Before you run the Convert Text to Columns Wizard, insert a blank row at the top of your data. (Courier is a monospace font and may help Excel better "see" the natural breaking points for the data.)Īnother possibility is to trick Excel into thinking that it is best not to guess about breaks. For instance, some people have reported better results in Excel's guesses if you format the source column with a Courier font before doing the conversion.
There are a few things you can try, however, that may help. There is no way to stop Excel from guessing when trying to parse fixed-width data. She wonders if there is a way to clear all of the suggested break lines at once so she can enter the break lines manually where she wants them. She needs to use the fixed-width parsing in the tool, and when she runs the wizard Excel looks at the source data and suggests places where the data should be "broken." Milda finds this annoying, as Excel normally guesses wrong. I can do it manually each time with the Text Import Wizard, but I'm wondering if there is a way to create a 'text import template' or something similar - since these files are always the same format.
I need to import them into Excel but Excel doesn't perfectly pick up the columns. txt file on a Sharepoint Site causes Run-Time. I receive files on occasion in a fixed width format. Milda needs to use Excel's Convert Text to Columns Wizard quite often for one of her work projects. Excel Macro for Importing Text File with fixed width using VBA.