We can see what those options are by right-clicking anywhere on the imported data. But if you import a text file into Excel, there are many more options.
So once the location for the data is selected, I can click Ok and the data is added to the worksheet starting at cell F2.Īs I mentioned above, if you copy-and-paste data into Excel there’s no way to update it without copying and pasting again. You can also choose to import the data to a new sheet. If I select cell F2, that selection will be represented in the window. The cell that is selected is going to be the top left corner of the imported data. Now Excel is asking where to put the data. There are more details to Text Import Wizard that I’ll cover in another post, but for now click Next twice and then Finish. And once I select the text file, the Text Import Wizard opens. You can find this command under the Data tab in the “Get External Data” group.īy clicking on that button, we’re given the option to select a text file. But if it’s not, we can use a text data import in Excel to create a refreshable table of data from a text file. The only way to update it is to re-paste the data.
However, once the data has been pasted into Excel, there is really no good way to refresh it later on if the source file changes. In this case, the data was separated into tabs, and everything came into columns like we’d want.
If the text data contains tab-separated-values, meaning that the columns of data are separated by a tab-stop character, then the data will automatically split into columns in Excel. The simplest way to get this data into Excel, although it may not be the best, is just to highlight it, type Ctrl+C to copy it, then select a cell in the workbook, and type Ctrl+V to paste it.