George,

You don't say if you're using File - Open, or Data - Get external data.
Tell us the specific steps, in Excel terms.

There's some information on Excel and text files at
http://www.smokeylake.com/excel/textfiles.htm that may be helpful.

--
Earl Kiosterud
mvpearl omitthisword at verizon period net
-------------------------------------------

"George" wrote in message
...
I have for some time updating a worksheet in Excel 2002 from a CSV file.
The
source of that file has now switched from comma separated to tab
separated. I
can't seem to prevent Excel from trying to read the file wrong. I have
tried
renaming to .txt and .tab to no effect. I can't even import the
tab-separated
file into a blank worksheet within the same Excel file. The import text
wizard will not start up. It seems that Excel knows about the original
file
and I haven't figured out how to remove that information. How do I cancel
out
Excel's inappropriate knowledge of the file so that I can tell it about
the
tab-separated version?

Thank you, George