
The new ‘powerful’ data options that replaced the legacy wizard are horrendously cumbersome where the wizard was immediately effective.įurther, in my company’s Excel 2016 the helpful steps in this blog post are inapplicable. They earn legitimate accolades for excellent innovations, and then they earn legitimate wrath for taking them away. The removal of the legacy wizard is another wretched Microsoft blunder. Just wanted to save others from the same difficulties I’ve experienced!
#EXCEL TEXT IMPORT WIZARD FILE ORIGIN HOW TO#
The legacy import wizard doesn’t appear to use the same approach to interpret how to delimit the data fields in a file, and so doesn’t appear to “fail” in this way when an inconsistent data file is imported. If the file is corrected to make all the lines in the file have the same quantity of data fields, then these latter two dropdowns will appear. Only the “File Origin” dropdown appears, while the “Delimiter” and “Data Type Detection” dropdowns will not be shown. If you attempt to load a text file with differing quantities of data fields within each line using the new “From Text/CSV” function from the Get & Transform Data group, there is a problem.Īfter a file is selected, the window showing the first lines of the file with the drop-downs “File Origin”, “Delimiter”, and “Data Type Detection” will not appear as shown in the above example. I wanted to add some useful information to this discussion Henrik, thank you for posting this very useful information. In order to achieve this, click on “Close & Load” in the top-left corner.


For dates, you could define the order of days, months and years.

Select how you want to define the columns: Either with a character as a separator or with a fixed width.

Please refer to the paragraph above if this option is missing. If you have a recent Excel version and there is no button called “From Text” (but instead “From Text/CSV”), click on “Get Data”, then on “Legacy Wizards” and then on “From Text (Legacy)”.
