Tab Delimiting with even lines

**Nophy** · 09-14-2009, 06:03 PM

Hello, my boss wants me to take an excel database created with excel 2007 and turn it into a tab delimited text file. He was very specific about it needing to be tab delimited and a .txt file, he does not want any marks (i.e. commas, pipe-lines, etc) between the data.

My problem is that the excel file looks like
9/12/09 3:12 2002 blahblahll-------blahblahblah
9/13/09 3:13 2143 blahblahblah---blahblah
(Dashes are purely there to line up the data in this post, they are not present in the actual file)

When I save it as tab delimited text file, it comes out at
9/12/09 3:12 2002 blahblahl blahblahblah
9/13/09 3:13 2143 blahblahblah blahblah

Is there anyway to get all the columns lined up as they are in the excel file?
If anyone needs more information let me know

**JBeaucaire** · 09-14-2009, 06:10 PM

Originally Posted by Nophy

Is there anyway to get all the columns lined up as they are in the excel file?

No, and it's not necessary. The purpose of tab-delimitation is to ease the use of the data with another program, probably through an import process.

What the file itself looks like to humans who peer at it with a text editor should be irrelevant. Your boss didn't state that as a need, did he?

**Nophy** · 09-14-2009, 06:47 PM

Yeah, he did, but he didn't tell me what it was going to be used for. Its possible that he doesn't know that the visual format does not matter to the program. I'll ask him about that tomorrow.

Thanks!

**JBeaucaire** · 09-14-2009, 07:43 PM

Tell him some of his options are:

Comma-delimited (.csv) - visually does not "lineup" when viewed with a text editor

Tab-delimited (.txt) - visually does not "lineup" when viewed with a text editor

Space-delimited (.prn) - visually DOES "lineup" when viewed with a text editor