Wordpad to Excel

Hi There,

Am new to the forum and a novice really when it comes to excel, i can do all the basics but don't know much beyond the surface formulas etc...

I am hoping someone can help me out of a problem i have. I have some numerical data (temperature readings) that was recorded / stored to a wordpad file.

I have to do some analysis of the data, such as finding mean / maximum and temperature differentials, which i thought would be as easy as opeining up the wordpad file in excel, and then doing formulas (such as =D7-E7).

However, i cannot get any formulas to cork - they all arrive back with VALUE and although all the data is numbers to look at, it might be stored as a text format? (my laymen knowledge isn't that great!)

am i missing out any steps to be able to use the data i have in wordpad as numbers in excel so i can use formulas?

i have a few thousand rows to go through!

Any help would be very very appreciated.

With thanks in advance

roondog

numbers should work. but when the wizard opens on import try i think its step 3
make sure all columns are general (select first and last using shift and click the general button) then finish
failing that post a small sample for us to look at.

Another alternative if you think they are actual text values is to type 1 in a spare cell somewhere (make sure it is formatted to GENERAL first), then copy it, select all your "numbered" cells, and Paste Special > Multipy > OK

Post it here

just a chunk will do must be under 1000kb (1 meg) xl or 1oo k txt or zip it up and try

ZIP the file.

You can do the follow steps:

1) Open the text file in excel
2) When Text import wizard --> select Delimited
then check only Coma
3) After that the result is 6 columns data, however, the data is text-type so we should change them in the next step
4) Enter the formula to cell H1:
=VALUE(SUBSTITUTE(A1," ",""))
and Copy across to range I1:M1, Formatting these cell to adjust the format-type (i.e: date, time, number,...etc)
then Copy down for rest rows H2:M...

Note:
+ There are more 65536 lines in your text files, so you had better to use Ms.Excell 2007 to convert the data
OR
+ if you want to continue to use the previous version excel (i.e Excel 2003), you have to separate the data file to some files containing less than 65536 lines