Importing text into Excel...

[Guest]

Greetings, I have some reports generated as .RTF files, I can open them and
save them as .txt files for import into Excel.

With the text import wizard you can create line breaks thus separating data
into columns. However since I have some large text descriptions in the file
I want to have numerous lines be imported into the same row. Presently it
sticks one line of text into each separate row. Is this possible or am I
missing something obvious?

Thanks for any help.

 

[Doug Kanter]

Greetings, I have some reports generated as .RTF files, I can open them
and
save them as .txt files for import into Excel.

With the text import wizard you can create line breaks thus separating
data
into columns. However since I have some large text descriptions in the
file
I want to have numerous lines be imported into the same row. Presently it
sticks one line of text into each separate row. Is this possible or am I
missing something obvious?

Thanks for any help.

If I'm reading your question correctly, it seems that once these long
descriptions are in Excel, they're forcing overly large column widths,
right? How about Format, Cells, Alignment, Wrap?

 

[Guest]

No, the problem is that each line of text is forced into a different row,
thus I have what should be a paragraph of text split up into many rows. I
would like to be able to merge a bunch of this text into one cell. Then I
would do as you suggest and wrap the text to make it readable. (Sorry my
garbled original explanation of the problem. )

 

[Dave Peterson]

When you import a text file, excel sees each line as a new row.

Depending on how the data is laid out, you may be able to manipulate it after
you import it.

But there are plenty of ways this won't work (multiple fields having multiple
lines).

You may be better off manipulating the text file and changing those
linefeed/carriage returns within each field to a different (unique) character.

Then import the file and change that unique character to an alt-enter.