Importing text into Excel is a fairly easy process once you understand the
variables.

Excel can read two types of PLAIN text files.  I believe that what you need
to use is the first type.

The first is called a "fixed length" file because EVERY line (or record) is
the exact same length.  Within each record (row), the individual elements
ALWAYS begin at exactly the same position all the time.  So using your
example, the first field is from position 1 to 6 (even though it is only 5
digits long) and the second field is from position 8 through 17.  Again, it
does not matter if all positions are used, because the information is always
left justified to begin with.  When you import this type of file, Excel will
display the first five records and you just point and click to "tell" Excel
where each field (column) begins.

The second type of file is called a delimited file.  In this type of file,
there must be some special character used to indicate the separation between
fields.  Most commonly, this is called a comma delimited file because the
comma is special character.  So your example file would need to be modified
to look like this:
15121,AL WILSON,The snake,Who could be loving you,15
The second most common delimited file is the TAB delimited file, so named
because the tab key is the special identifying character.  This file type is
used when commas must be embedded in the field information.  Like with a
last name and suffix such as SMITH, JR.  This extra comma would throw off
the synchronization of a comma delimited file.  If you used the TAB to
separate the values in your list, then this file would import very easily.
Once imported, it too would display the first five records, but in this
case, you would make a selection from the dropdown list and choose the
delimiting character (comma, tab, etc)


Jim Meagher
=====
Micro Solutions Consulting     Member of The HTML Writers Guild
http://www.ezy.net/~microsol   International Webmasters Association
=====

> -----Original Message-----
> From: PCSOFT - Personal Computer software discussion list
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Mick Fitzpatrick
> Hello
>
> I have quite a long list in Word that I would like to transfer to
> Excel. The
> list is very basic and is made up of 5 columns or portions of
> information in
> each line, like this:
>
> 15121 AL WILSON The snake / Who could be loving you 15
>