(This is all occuring at a data lab in a customer's office, so I really don't
know what OS or version of Office - I'm guessing OS is 2003 and Office is 2K
- or the type of app the data is coming from. Also, there's no telling what
any of the last 50 users of that PC may have changed over the last week).

I have a user copying data from the customer's proprietary data mining
application into Excel. Usually this is seamless and the data pops right
into the correct columns. This time, though, each row of data is pasting
into 1 column, with a box thrown in as a column delimiter.

If it was just using semi-colons or similar, I could easily text-to columns
it to get it right, but I can't figure a way to use these boxes as the
delimiter in the wizard.

We have tried re-starting Excel, but want to avoid re-booting since the data
mining took over 3 hours and we don't want to do that again.

Any suggestions? I figure there must be a setting somewhere...

Thank you!

Erin

Erin

The "box" de-limiter is most likely a carriage return character.

Try Text to columnsDe-limited byOther..ALT + 0010 entered on NumPad keys.

Finish.


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 09:11:03 -0700, Erin wrote:

(This is all occuring at a data lab in a customer's office, so I really don't
know what OS or version of Office - I'm guessing OS is 2003 and Office is 2K
- or the type of app the data is coming from. Also, there's no telling what
any of the last 50 users of that PC may have changed over the last week).

I have a user copying data from the customer's proprietary data mining
application into Excel. Usually this is seamless and the data pops right
into the correct columns. This time, though, each row of data is pasting
into 1 column, with a box thrown in as a column delimiter.

If it was just using semi-colons or similar, I could easily text-to columns
it to get it right, but I can't figure a way to use these boxes as the
delimiter in the wizard.

We have tried re-starting Excel, but want to avoid re-booting since the data
mining took over 3 hours and we don't want to do that again.

Any suggestions? I figure there must be a setting somewhere...

Thank you!

Erin

I've got a different guess.

I'm betting that the person with the problem has already run data|text to
columns and changed the delimiter from tab to something else.

And that when person copies the data from the other program, it includes the tab
character as the field separator.

You can test this by selecting that column and doing Data|Text to
columns|Delimited by tab.

If it worked, then keep reading...

Excel likes to help by remembering the settings from the last data|text to
columns.

You can close excel and reopen to reset this memory

--or you can take advantage of it

Select an empty cell
put asdf in it
data|text to columns|delimited by tabs
and finish up.
Then clean up that cell.

Then off to the other application to copy the data and then back to excel to
paste to see if it worked.

Erin wrote:

(This is all occuring at a data lab in a customer's office, so I really don't
know what OS or version of Office - I'm guessing OS is 2003 and Office is 2K
- or the type of app the data is coming from. Also, there's no telling what
any of the last 50 users of that PC may have changed over the last week).

I have a user copying data from the customer's proprietary data mining
application into Excel. Usually this is seamless and the data pops right
into the correct columns. This time, though, each row of data is pasting
into 1 column, with a box thrown in as a column delimiter.

If it was just using semi-colons or similar, I could easily text-to columns
it to get it right, but I can't figure a way to use these boxes as the
delimiter in the wizard.

We have tried re-starting Excel, but want to avoid re-booting since the data
mining took over 3 hours and we don't want to do that again.

Any suggestions? I figure there must be a setting somewhere...

Thank you!

Erin

--

Dave Peterson