Sorry I searched this and no one seems to have a solution. I tried pre-defiming columns as text but it gets over-riden by the paste. Paste Special doesn't do the trick..

paste special as text on tabular data coming from a web site puts most of the data in the first column. It no longer spreads the columns of pasted data into its own excel columns

the tabular data, tab delimited, I want to 'copy&paste' looks like this:

1) OGRODOWICZ MARK M47 6306 BROOKLYN NY 533 446 41 24:00 23:25 7:33 20:58

2) CHAO DUSTIN M35 3738 NEW YORK NY 534 447 155 24:02 23:47 7:40 23:16

The paste should put this data into 2 rows, 12 columns in WYSIWYG format. All data is text.

One problem is Excel insists putting in 24:02:00 rater than 24:02.
The other problem Excel sees that and 7:40 as some kind of date/time.

Is this a lost cause?