ExcelBanter - how to save worksheet with hard tabs

It doesn't sound like you really want a tab delimited file. It sounds like you
want a fixed width file.

Saved from a previous post:

There's a limit of 240 characters per line when you do File|saveas and use .prn
files. So if your data wouldn't create a record that was longer than 240
characters, you can save the file as .prn.

I like to use a fixed width font (courier new) and adjust the column widths
manually. But this can take a while to get it perfect. (Save it, check the
output in a text editor, back to excel, adjust, save, and recheck in that text
editor. Lather, rinse, and repeat!)

Alternatively, you could concatenate the cell values into another column:

=LEFT(A1&REPT(" ",5),5) & LEFT(B1&REPT(" ",4),4) & TEXT(C1,"000,000.00")

(You'll have to modify it to match what you want.)

Drag it down the column to get all that fixed width stuff.

Then I'd copy and paste to notepad and save from there. Once I figured out that
ugly formula, I kept it and just unhide that column when I wanted to export the
data.

If that doesn't work for you, maybe you could do it with a macro.

Here's a link that provides a macro:
http://google.com/groups?threadm=015...0a% 40phx.gbl

Alan wrote:

I wish to save a tab delimited worksheet with items starting in specific
columns. For example, company name starts in col 7, address startes in col 27
and so on. Is there a way to keep the hard tabs when saving as a tab
delimited file?

--

Dave Peterson