Page 649 - Excel 2013 All-in-One For Dummies

Figure 2-14:
The third
of three Text Import Wizard dialog boxes for parsing the text file.
External Data Query 631
To assign one of the three data types to a column, click its column in the Data Preview section and then click the appropriate radio button (General, Text, or Date) in the Column Data Format section in the upper-right corner.
In determining values when using the General data format, Excel uses the period (.) as the decimal separator and the comma (,) as the thousands separator. If you’re dealing with data that uses these two symbols in just the opposite way (the comma for the decimal and the period for the thousands separator), as is the case in many European countries, click the Advanced button in the Step 3 of 3 dialog box to open the Advanced Text Import Settings dialog box. There, select the comma (,) in the Decimal Separator drop-down list box and the period (.) in the Thousands Separator drop-down list box before you click OK. If your text file uses trailing minus signs (as in 100–) to represent negative numbers (as in –100), make sure that the Trailing Minus for Negative Numbers check box contains a check mark.
If you want to change the date format for a column to which you’ve assigned the Date data format, click its M-D-Y code in the Date drop-down list box (where M stands for the month, D for the day, and Y for the year).
To skip the importing of a particular column, click it in the Data Preview and then select the Do Not Import Column (Skip) option button at the bottom of the Column Data Format section.
After you have all the columns formatted as you want, click the Finish button. Excel then displays the Import Data dialog box, where you specify where you want the parsed text data imported Existing Worksheet or New Worksheet (the options for determining how to view your data are all grayed out) and whether or not to add this parsed data to workbook’s Data Model.
Book VI Chapter 2
Filtering and Querying a Data List