"open with" on a text file gives differentresults in 08 than 04. Bug?

M

maser

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel

I'm hopeful somebody can tell me if I'm missing something or if this is a bug in Excel 08 that needs to be reported.

A database we use exports information into a tab-delimited text file.

One of the sets of information it exports is a series of dates that need to go into *one cell* in Excel.

The exported text file has this as the series of dates between one set of tabs (this is an extract from a much larger text file):

"02/08/2000
02/07/2001
02/07/2001
10/01/2001
08/07/2002
08/07/2002
08/07/2002
06/20/2007
06/19/2007"

If I use Excel 04 -- and "open with" the file -- (or hold down the shift key using File --> Open to bypass the text import wizard), the *single cell* contains the data like:

02/08/2000
02/07/2001
02/07/2001
10/01/2001
08/07/2002
08/07/2002
08/07/2002
06/20/2007
06/19/2007

Which is what my user expects.

However, in *Excel 08*, doing the same action (either "open with" Excel 08 or "File --> Open" and hold down the shift key to bypass the wizard) -- each date is in it's own cell.

Which is not what the user expects (and really, really messes up the spreadsheet).

This *seems* like a bug in Excel 08 because if I open the file (correctly) in Excel 04 and save it as an Excel file, then Excel 08 opens the file correctly.

But doing a "Save As" in Excel 08 *as text* exports the file so it looks like the original (with the dates surrounded by quotation marks -- tab delimited), but doing another "open with" puts everything back in an individual cell again.

Which is wrong.

Office 08 has been patched to 12.1.5. (And Office 04 is patched, too...)

Am I just missing anything about Excel 08 that might make this work properly? What I *can't* get to work (even in 04) is using the "import Wizard" to get things in one cell. Maybe there's a trick there that I'm not seeing, but using the import wizard is not giving what I need.

- Steve
 

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