Opening CSV's as Text

[GaryB]

Is there a way of forcing Excel to use the text file opening wizard to open a CSV file? The file I have is full of extraneous crud and dates written as YYYYMMDD that I can ignore or reformat if only I can get the wizard to kick in and open it as Fixed Width. Unfortunately I can't just rename the file to .txt (it's networked and nearly always in use by someone else) and, as it's usually about 25MB , I want to try and avoid opening it and resaving it as .txt before reopening it.

Thanks

GaryB

 

[SpillerBD]

I wouldn't OPEN a CSV file. I would import it using either the legacy wizard or Link through PowerQuery. Both of these options allow for better control than just Opening a file.
PowerQuery is the more versatile of the two and provides better steps to follow as implemented. Any additional cleaning or corrections can be made before loading the data. ETL, Extract, Transform, Load.
Also, if files or an agregation of files is brought in by using PowerQuery, the data can be sent to the Datamodel instead of a worksheet allowing for millions of records to be imported and analyzed.

 

[enoid]

Good points.