Hi everyone. I'm writing this from my desk at the office. Three
colleagues and I have been given the unpleasant task of opening
innumerable (but simple) csv files from the net and then putting in
certain data to an Excel workbook.

My problem is this. While I can easily open the csv file in Excel (it
does it automatically as a window within IE), and get the data in the
correct format, nicely divided into cells, eg:

12 15 222 55

two of my colleagues cannot. They get:
12,15,222,55

Now, I know how to open text files so that Excel uses the commas to
separate the text into cells, but we do have to open about 5,000 csv
files so I don't want the whole hassle of specifying what Excel has to
do with each file.

We are all using Windows 2000 Professional. The conversion works well
with both Excel 97 SR2 and Excel 97 on two computers and does not work
well with Excel 97SR2 and Excel 97 on two other computers. Our PCs are
identical machines all bought at the same time!

Our IT guy says that somehow we must have originally specified that csv
files had to be opened one way or the other, and that this information
has been written to registry. Is this possible? Is there a way of
amending it so that csv files open correctly? Could anyone help,
please?

Could this be the solution? This link to an earlier newsgroup topic
has a post from Dave Peterson dated Wed, Jan 7 2004 6:15 pm. It seems
to address your dilemma.

http://groups.google.com/group/micro...&start=2&num=3

I'd look at the windows setting that controls the list separator.

windows start button|settings|control panel|Regional settings applet
(or regional and language options)

Click the customize button
Numbers Tab
List separator

Make sure it matches the separator in the data (a comma).

Emre Yigit wrote:

Hi everyone. I'm writing this from my desk at the office. Three
colleagues and I have been given the unpleasant task of opening
innumerable (but simple) csv files from the net and then putting in
certain data to an Excel workbook.

My problem is this. While I can easily open the csv file in Excel (it
does it automatically as a window within IE), and get the data in the
correct format, nicely divided into cells, eg:

12 15 222 55

two of my colleagues cannot. They get:
12,15,222,55

Now, I know how to open text files so that Excel uses the commas to
separate the text into cells, but we do have to open about 5,000 csv
files so I don't want the whole hassle of specifying what Excel has to
do with each file.

We are all using Windows 2000 Professional. The conversion works well
with both Excel 97 SR2 and Excel 97 on two computers and does not work
well with Excel 97SR2 and Excel 97 on two other computers. Our PCs are
identical machines all bought at the same time!

Our IT guy says that somehow we must have originally specified that csv
files had to be opened one way or the other, and that this information
has been written to registry. Is this possible? Is there a way of
amending it so that csv files open correctly? Could anyone help,
please?

--

Dave Peterson

Dear Dave,

Thanks very much. That does the trick!

Much appreciated,


Emre