How to Import Data in MS Excel 2007

Let me go ahead and start with the fresh worksheet and let us talk about another way of getting data into Excel which is importing data that is bringing data in from another data source. Now, since the data sources that most Excel user works with are text file, let us use the text file in order to walk through example of importing text. There is a text file on the Lesson 2 sample folder and we are going to go ahead and import that particular file.

We will start by clicking on the Data Tab. And, once you are in the Data Tab, you will see a button called From Text and it gets external group. Click on the From Text and it is going to ask you where is the text that you want to import? I am going to go ahead and find the file. It is right here, the Salesdata.txt file and I want to click Import. That particular action activates the Text Import Wizard which has got three steps. The first step is to tell the wizard whether the file that you are working with is delimited or fixed with. Now, without getting into the technical aspect of a text file – delimited basically means that the fields or the columns in the file are separated by characters whether it would be a column or a space or a tab. Fixed with basically means that each particular column or field in the text file are aligned with spaces and need no delimitation. Our file is coma delimitated that basically means that there is a coma between every field. I am going to click next here.

Step two of the Text Import Wizard basically asks you which character or characters define the delimitation of your file. For example, in our file, our fields are delimited by comas so our fields are coma delimitated. So, what I will do is uncheck tab because our field are not tab delimited. I will check coma and as soon as I do that, you will notice that in this representation of our text file, the fields in our text file are now appearing to be in their own specific columns which is a good thing as to what we want. Now, let us move on to step three. In step three, you have the option of defining the data types for your fields. For example, you can define a field as a number or date or a text. In this case, we do not really care. We just want to import the field so I am going to go ahead and click on finish. Now, once I click finish, a new dialog box pops up as the import data dialog box and it basically asked you “Where do you want to put this stuff?” Right now, I am going to go ahead and select A1 which is already selected and press the okay button. So, our file is imported successfully. We have lots of data in and the best part is we did not even have to type it in or copy and paste it. It was all from an import.

Now, let us take a moment to talk about what we have got here. Up until now, you have entered data into a single cell or maybe two or three cells but as you can see, a lot of cells are field out here. The difference between this and what you have typed in is all of this cells are somewhat related. What do I mean by related? Well, although each of these cells has their own values, together, they all amount to information about another entity or bigger entity. For example, I have got some information here on line two about the revenues that were brought in by a particular product in the Denver Market. Well, that particular row of data has six cells in it. Each of those cells has their own values but together, they make up information about the Denver Market. Now, if you carry this concept through, it is all of the rows in this Data Table. Every cell and every row together make up information about transactions. This is transaction table. It shows the transactions for multiple regions and multiple markets, multiple products and it shows a lot of revenue information but it shows in the block of data, a Data Table.

Tables typically have a couple of attributes. First, a header row which is usually the first row of the table that contains labels describing the data in each column. Next, the data in each row of the column describes the same entity or unit or measure, for example, regions or mark