One arduous solution is to write VBA code that opens a text file, reads the
sheet cell by cell and writes them to the file and closes the file.

A simpler solution is to use the Jet 4.0 provider to read the sheet in its
entirety into an ADO recordset object and then to write this object , using
its GetString() method to a TXT file. This method allows full control: you
can write a subset of any sheet to a txt file also.