i have a massive text file that is nothing more than a series of words
separated by commas, i.e.

dog, cat, ball, clouds, rain

there are probably 20k to 30k entries ...

is there a way i can import this file into excel so that these words
are stacked in 1 column??

One way is to first open the file in Word and use
Edit Replace
to change all the commas by paragraph breaks: "^p" without the quotes. You
might want to remove the space characters the same way.

Then save a copy as a text file and open it in Excel.