Messy tab characters

try Data, Import External Data, Import data, locate you file (I presume these are saved as a .txt file) and set the Wizard to delimited and the delimiter to a character that will give you the correct format.

Hope this helps

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Originally Posted by Gargoyl

Hi.

I've got a list of words from another application. Whilst the tabs are tidy and neat in that application, when I paste them into excel they get all messed up.

for example (imported file into excel)

hello

hej

I

jag

car

bil

So the values are placed into many different columns. I just want them into to columns, like this:

hello

hej

I

jag

car

bil

Does anyone have a clue of how to fix my file?
I would deeply appreciate it!

/Niklas B

> I've got a list of words from another application. Whilst the tabs are
> tidy and neat in that application, when I paste them into excel they
> get all messed up.
>
> for example (imported file into excel)
>
> hello hej
> I jag
> car bil
>
> So the values are placed into many different columns. I just want them
> into to columns, like this:
>
> hellohej
> Ijag
> carbil
>
> Does anyone have a clue of how to fix my file?

Maybe it would help to open the file in MS-Word first. Use Word to replace
all the tabs with nothing. Opening the resulting file in Excel should give
one column, which appears to be what you want.

Or maybe you want multiple columns, but no empty cells in between. In that
case, in Word you can replace tab-tab with a single tab, and repeat until
you get no substitutions.

As always, work with a copy of the file. If things don’t go right, you’ll
still have the original.