# Open pipe delimited file into spreadsheet?



## Comp_crazy (Sep 24, 2004)

I'll try to keep this short, but here it is.... The small business office where I work purchased a database CD which is in pipe delimited format. I'm confident we can't get the data any other way. I can open it with all the data in Wordpad to view, but we would like to be able to open into a spreadsheet or database that puts each piped piece of data into a seperate column or field so we can sort and maybe print merge the data for labels, etc. We are running Win98 and MSWorks (an older 4.X version) on a Pentium II (I think 450 Mhz) machine. This is out of my league... Is there software to buy or can I force it to open like I want? I tried opening in Works Spreadsheet and it combined the data and put it all in 2 columns... I used a friend's Excel program to see if it was any different and it put all data in 1 column. HELP! Thanks for anything... I'd like to learn. Like I said, our office is small and I'm probably the most computer literate, so I'd like to figure this out.


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## Rockn (Jul 29, 2001)

Importing into Excel should work just fine, you just need to specify the pipe | charachter as your delimiter during the import process.


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## Rollin_Again (Sep 4, 2003)

If you open with Excel you can use a feature called *Text to Columns* to delimit the data however you want. Just select the single column of Excel data and then click *Data --> Text to Columns*. You can then either manually insert breaks between your data or you can tell Excel to delimit the data using spaces or any other character including the pipe character *|*

Rollin


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## Comp_crazy (Sep 24, 2004)

Thanks for the info... I'd love to try it and will figure out something, but right now we don't have Excel. Remember, I took the CD to a friend's house and tried and Excel is pretty expensive, but if we have to I guess we'll bite the bullet and buy it. Any possible way I can do this in Works Spreadsheet? I did not see any import feature though, just open.


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## Rockn (Jul 29, 2001)

A spreadsheet is a spreadsheet and Works is almost the same as Excel. Open it as a text file and use the import settings like described.


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