Page 648 - Excel 2013 All-in-One For Dummies

630 External Data Query
Figure 2-13:
The second of three Text Import Wizard dialog boxes for parsing the text file.
In the Step 2 of 3 dialog box, you need to select the delimiting character in the event that the wizard selects the wrong character in the Delimiters sec- tion. If your text file uses a custom delimiting character, you need to select the Other check box and then enter that character in its text box. If your file uses two consecutive characters (such as a comma and a space), you need to select their check boxes as well as the Treat Consecutive Delimiters As One check box.
By default, the Text Import Wizard treats any characters enclosed in a pair of double quotes as text entries (as opposed to numbers). If your text file uses a single quote, click the single quote (‘) character in the Text Qualifier drop-down list box.
Figure 2-14 shows you the third Text Import Wizard dialog box that appears when you click the Next button in the Step 2 of 3 dialog box. In the Step 3
of 3 dialog box, you get to assign a data type to the various columns of text data or indicate that a particular column of data should be skipped and therefore not imported into your Excel worksheet.
When setting data formats for the columns of the text file, you can choose among the following three data types:
✦ General (the default) to convert all numeric values to numbers, entries recognized as date values to dates, and everything else in the column to text
✦ Text to convert all the entries in the column to text
✦ Date to convert all the entries to dates by using the date format shown in the associated drop-down list box