Convert excel (.xls) to tab delimited (.txt) without double quotat

  • Thread starter Thread starter Andrea
  • Start date Start date
A

Andrea

When converting my excel spreadsheet to tab delimited, I get double quotation
marks around anything that has a comma. This is making the datafeed in my
website appear unclean. Is there any way around this?
 
Yes, but it involves another step outside of Excel. When you select
tab-delimited, that is the behavior you get.

As soon as you save your file, open it in NotePad or EditPad (an even more
robust notepad program) and do a Search/Replace.

Ctrl-H usually brings up the window.

Search: ","
Replace: ,
Replace All

Then save the document again.

Will this work for you?
 
Slight correction... since the quotes are around an entire field, just search
for all quotations and replace them with nothing.

Search: "
Replace: (leave completely blank)

BTW, make sure you don't import this new file into a program that interprets
commas as delimiters, too. That's why Excel adds the Quotes. Pretty much any
program worth its salt will see those quotes and know this field is a word
with a comma in it and import it properly.

You might not always need to correct this data, though you didn't indicate
what you were doing with it, so...

That should do it.
 
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