Excel and delimited filesUse Excel responsibly ... and perhaps much less
Dr. Jennifer (Jenny) BryanDepartment of Statistics and Michael Smith LaboratoriesUniversity of British Columbia
[email protected]@JennyBryanhttps://github.com/jennybchttp://www.stat.ubc.ca/~jenny/
Excel is great for browsing delimited files.Even OK for editing, in certain situations.
if the desired file is greyed out when you try to open ...
use the “enable” drop-down menu to expand what Excel considers open-able
you can even go nuts and enable “All Files”
in particular, Excel is unnecessarily squeamish about the *.tsv extension commonly used with tab-delimited files
File > Open...
Excel can write delimited files.
File > Save As... Format
Excel will try to freak you out with a warning.
For plain ol’ data, ignore and proceed.
The sky is falling!
