Saving as Text (tab delimited) surrounds text with "quotes"

[Mike521]

Hi all,

I'm trying to save an excel file as a tab delimited text file. I do not want to use quotes as a text qualifier. However, certain fields in the file (fields with large amounts of text) are automatically being surrounded in quotes by excel.

So let's say I have a spreadsheet with two columns, 1 row, that reads:

data | data data data data

All I have to do is open this and save it as a text file, and Excel is automatically changing the text file to read:

data | "data data data data"

Using Excel 2003

can anyone help solve this annoying problem?

[David Biddulph]

"Mike521" <[email protected]> wrote in
message news:[email protected]...
>
> Hi all,
>
> I'm trying to save an excel file as a tab delimited text file. I do not
> want to use quotes as a text qualifier. However, certain fields in the
> file (fields with large amounts of text) are automatically being
> surrounded in quotes by excel.
>
> So let's say I have a spreadsheet with two columns, 1 row, that reads:
>
> data | data data data data
>
> All I have to do is open this and save it as a text file, and Excel is
> automatically changing the text file to read:
>
> data | "data data data data"
>
> Using Excel 2003
>
> can anyone help solve this annoying problem?

I think you may find that the fields which get surrounded with quotes are
those which contain commas.

One possible work round is to select your cells in Excel, copy, and paste
into Notepad. Save from Notepad and that will hopefully give you a
tab-delimited text file without the extra quotes.
--
David Biddulph

[Mike521]

looks like that did the trick! Thanks a ton, too bad there's no way to get Excel to do it correctly, but this will work for us

[Matt White]

Use OpenOffice's Calc. It's free, has everything that almost anyone could want, and works great for this! You can either open a tab-delimited text file and it will let you edit it and keep the format, or save in its native format and you can still save as a .csv but, unlike Excel, you can specify the delimiter *and* whether to quote strings.