Mac Excel Problem saving tab delimited in mac

Hi I appreciate any help. I've spent the necessary 5 hours googling for a solution to no avail. I am trying to create a tab delimited plain text file. What happens is that when using Macintosh's version of Excel, I save my excel file as a tab delimited text file, it doesn't format it correctly. In finder it shows up improperly as a "Microsoft Excel Text Document" and not as is should be like when I do it in Windows as "Plain Text" document. What should I do. Thanks.

I am not at home to try this but if you want it as a plain text file try opening the Excel text file in Text Edit and resave it as plain text. Or open in Word and resave as plain text.

Originally Posted by goastros

Hi I appreciate any help. I've spent the necessary 5 hours googling for a solution to no avail. I am trying to create a tab delimited plain text file. What happens is that when using Macintosh's version of Excel, I save my excel file as a tab delimited text file, it doesn't format it correctly. In finder it shows up improperly as a "Microsoft Excel Text Document" and not as is should be like when I do it in Windows as "Plain Text" document. What should I do. Thanks.

Hi,

I too have a Mac and can save XL files in Tab delimited format OK.

1. File
2. Save As
3. Enter required name - don't forget to delete the '.xls' bit as this isn't included in the default highlight name and will remain unless you delete.
4. Go to the Format drop down, scroll down to the 'Text (Tab delimited)' option.
5. Answer Yes to the warning about saving features which are not compatible
6. Save

HTH

Originally Posted by goastros

Hi I appreciate any help. I've spent the necessary 5 hours googling for a solution to no avail. I am trying to create a tab delimited plain text file. What happens is that when using Macintosh's version of Excel, I save my excel file as a tab delimited text file, it doesn't format it correctly. In finder it shows up improperly as a "Microsoft Excel Text Document" and not as is should be like when I do it in Windows as "Plain Text" document. What should I do. Thanks.

Hey,
I've been having the same issue... It seems that mac excel does something weird when separating rows, so what I did was save it as a windows formatted text file. This is also a tab delimited, but formatted for windows, which works really well.

I hope this helps!