Import Large Text File Into Excel

The MS Excel Table Import Wizard enables you to connect to a flat file (.txt) tab-separated file (.tab) or ama-separated file (.csv). To access the wizard from the PowerPivot window on the Home tab in the Get External Data group click the of data source from which you want to import tables. For more information see Import Data from a File s(v=).aspx . Friendly connection name Type a unique name for this data source connection. This is a required field. File Path Specify a full path for the file. Browse Navigate to a location where a file is available. Column Separator Select from a list of available column separators. Choose a separator that is not likely to occur in the . Tab (t) Columns are separated by a tab (t). Comma () Columns are separated by ama (). Semicolon (;) Columns are separated by a semicolon (;). Space ( ) Columns are separated by a space ( ). Colon () Columns are separated by a colon (). Vertical Bar (|) Columns are separated by a vertical bar (|). Advanced Specify the encoding and locale options for the flat file. Use first row as column headers Specify whether to use the first data row as the column headers of the destination table. Data preview Preview the data in the selected file and use the following options to modify the data import. Note Only the first 5 rows in the file are displayed in this preview. Checkbox in the column header Select the checkbox to include the column in the data import. Clear the checkbox to remove the column from the data import. Down-arrow button in the column header Sort and filter data in the column. Clear Row Filters Remove all filters that were applied to the data in the columns

I would like to try to highlight a couple of points that have been made by others that may not have gotten as much attention as I would like to see. What you get is what you mean Someone I think Richard Kinch described the distinction between something like LaTeX math and word processors as a distinction between What You Get Is What You Mean versus What You See Is All You Get. Let me try to illustrate with a somewhat contrived example. You might use italics in some document to for emphasis for foreign words for mathematical variables for titles of books for names of ships and so on. When you use italics for emphasis you mean italic something different than when you use it for some Latin phrase. When you are engaging in writing as opposed to formatting you write what you mean. You might write I really emphmean this; it's not just foreignpro forma. code When you are writing you are focusing on the content and meaning. You are deferring decisions about how emphmean and foreignpro forma will be rendered until you are in the mood to deal with such things. Now suppose that you (or an editor) decides that things like pro forma should not be italicized. By writing what you mean you can easily say that foreign be non-italic. But if you had done this with a word processor and had simply italicized both usages you would be in deep doo-doo going through an un-italicizing all of the foreign expressions. Now modern word processors have introduced style sheets that would allow you to do things as I've described but they are rarely used and not nearly as robust powerful and natural as in LaTeX math . Reusing others' solutions This separation that structural markup allows along with the flexibility to define your own macros (like foreign in the above section) means that solutions that others have found can be reused. For example if someone works out a way to draw the kinds of phrase structure diagrams that linguists like or tools that make it easy to write chemical equations Or nice way to handle breaks that are smaller than a subsection or work out marginal notes in the style of Edward Tufte's books this can (and often are) shared and improved upon by themunity. (Indeed all of the examples above are taken from packages available on the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN). (CTAN predates predates the Perlmunity's CPAN.) Update The content below has been added after the original answer Saying what you mean can be hard There is no doubt that getting started with a What You Get Is What Mean system is harder for most people than getting started with a What You See is All You Get one. A good chunk of that extra work is because you now have the responsibility to make your meaning clear. Let me give an example. The dot followed by whitespace . you might write in normal might have one of three different meanings. Let's consider three cases where we might a dot followed by white space (dot-space). Sentence final punctuation as in The cat is on the mat. The mat is ... code In an abbreviation made from initials as in The . operative disemboweled the ... code The space after the dot in Dr. Smith should not be larger than spaces between words (and may even be smaller) but most importantly never break a line there if you can at all avoid it. Contrasting 1 and 2 is really useful. The space after the dot should be treated in opposite ways for those two different meanings. When looking for good places to break lines 1 is a good place and 2 is a terrible place. We never want to see anything like Some blah blah whatever and so Dr. code Smith was annoyed that she was expected code to ... code So back when intelligent and trained humans were figuring out where to put in line breaks this could all be done well. But now to get it right the only human in the process needs to tell the system which dot-space they mean. TeX has some rules for guessing but those rules will miss lots of cases and so you have to tell it which kind of dot-space is meant. You can't always let it guess the meaning on its own. The designers of word processors certainly must be aware of these different meanings of dot-space. And TeX's algorithm for line breaking are not encumbered by patents so in theory word processors should be able to as good paragraph setting as TeX does. But in practice they don't have the freedom to use sentence final dot-spaces as good places to break lines because they have to worry about breaking in a Dr. Smith case. Unless the human tells the software what a dot-space means they can't make use of information it doesn't have. Word processors have meant things that might otherwise have been processed by a professional aren't. And so their results are crappy because to do it right someone has to be careful to say what is meant italic .

At the moment it almost feels like automation is getting further away not closer. It feels like there is too much focus on the stack i.e. people seem to enjoy layering frameworks on top of libraries on top of other frameworks. That leads toplication and moving targets so it hard to know what is automatable and what isn. In a previous job we were in the business of automating things for large banks and we did it quite well. It seems now that the industry is actually regressing away from systems that can really be automated. Too much focus on the web assumes human interaction important services like WhatsApp don have real APIs. I think if were going to get real automation in programming we need to step back to simpler building blocks get rid of all the frameworks which don really seem to do anything. Something like Smalltalk and particularly the Smalltalk VM seem ideal for this. It introspective and runs live i.e. you make changes to running systems. This I think provides an opportunity to make systems which can respond to changing requests and even automate a certain level of responding to those requests. I remember an answer by Alan Kay here on Quora suggesting an interesting idea that every object could have an URL. So a Smalltalk VM could somehow investigate the of request formulate a solution to the request and issue an URL for the service it provides. As it stands I think most of the industry is far too excited about addingplications which really don need to exist. Take Flask for Python I recently replaced a Flask project with a simpler Go service and for the life of me I really don know what problem Flask is supposed to be solving. I think if were really going to make progress in automating programming we need to cut right back to What Is Actually Needed (another Alan Kay-ism). Throw away all the stuff we don need and actually address the problem without theplications of Stacks frameworks and libraries we don need.

First it depends upon yourputer power. Next that's about the size of the municipal data files I got from reel tape back in my WIREdata days (1995-1996). The source of the data was a Prime mainframe. At the time only mainframe systems dealt with that quantity of data. The best way to extract and convert this data at the time on a 9MHZ Dell running Windows 95 was to use C programming (easy Win I remember) and open and write one record at a time or collect records in a structure if extra steps (like seeking all grantors) were involved. This was very early Internet days. The idea of importing and using municipal data was very new and untested. Each county had its own system and administrator. So that meant each extraction task was a separate project. My senior programmer created a system to make it easy to go from one project to the next with minimal coding each time (function pointers). It's hard to answer this question without details about your workstation and its capabilities. I have used both Notepad and Excel to open and view large files. If it's just to extract data or change something in the file I would write a program that finds it and rewrite file with the modification because I am very familiar with file I my oldest of programming skills.

It depends on many factors. E.g. how are the numbers separated? Is there other data in between the numbers which need to be kept in check with each associated number? How large is the file? Is it in a consistent arrangement or do some portions have numbers in different places? Is the numbers simply whole numbers or fractional or stuff like dates etc.? Are they all listed as Arabic decimal number digits or some other numbering system syntax or even abination of several? In some cases you could import such file into something like a spreadsheet (MSO Excel LibreOffice Calc GNU Calc etc.) and use it to convert the representing numbers into actual numbers and then sort it properly from that. Some editors also allow sorting lines in files though with numbers it may place something like 9 after something like 1 - if it not made to suit such multi-digit numbering sorts. If you want to get make a program which does this then youll need to search for some parsing library first (or create your own) so you can read the actual values of those numbers in the file (instead of simply seeing them as a bunch of characters). Only then would a proper sorting algorithm be able to work well on them. In some cases you could loose data. E.g. if the numbers are fractions then it may depend on the of number values you use (the file may contain more digits per number than the can amodate). Or even with whole numbers the digits in the file may represent a number either smaller or larger than the can hold. So you need some knowledge of what limits there are in the numbers in that file. Else you have to use some arbitrary precision library instead which in turn would mean your program is going to run many times slower than using native finite number s. If the file is too large to fit entirely into RAM (at least after conversion into numbers) then some sorting techniques are not possible (or be highly inefficient). You most likely need to create one or more temporary files to keep partially sorted results in the various steps involved in whatever algorithm youre using.

Material you will find on powerpivot will tell you that powerpivot is specifically designed to be used in conjunction with a data base for maximum efficiency. Access is a database and powerpivot is not. Power pivot that exists in Excel was for sure not designed for use as a database. In fact excel and access were designed to be buddies but access did not take off in popularity the way excel did. I do believe that powerpivot will be more popular than access this is likely even now.

Use the macro recording function to find out what methods are happening when you make changes to an Excel document. Otherwise you need to think of an automated task and then Google Doing x italic and y italic in VBA. Youre not going to learn italic anything fast but you can probably get a bulk of stuff done by hacking your way through it. Any coding or console language is not as simple as using a GUI like Excel does. It needs time willingness and dedication. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. VBA is however quite easy to learn if you are very experienced with how Excel works. You can make the s between what a macro does and what is going on in the Excel document manually. It also has excellent debugging and step-through functionality so you can step through your code manually and look at what is going on.

Importing data that is contained in Comma Separated Values (CSV) files is a verymon database task. The CSV format is ideally suited to importing into a database because it stores tabular data in a format that can easily be mapped to a database table. In fact CSV is amon data exchange format that has gained wide-spread acceptance by consumer business and scientific applications. Its mostmon use is moving tabular data between programs whose native formats are largely ipatible. Importing Data Natively using LOAD DATA INFILE Some databases such as MySQL provide special statements specifically for importing CSV data. MySQL statement is LOAD DATA INFILE. LOAD DATA INFILE 'c' code INTO TABLE customers code FIELDS TERMINATED BY '' code ENCLOSED BY '' code LINES TERMINATED BY 'n' code IGNORE 1 ROWS; code The LOAD DATA INFILE statement is flexible enough to support a wide array of Delimiter-separated Values (DSV) formats. As such it allows you to denote what characters delimit fields and lines. You can see in the above example that each field is separated by ama (indicated by FIELD TERMINATED BY '') code and enclosed by double quotation marks (specified by ENCLOSED BY ' code ). Finally each line of the CSV file is terminated by a newline character as indicated by LINES TERMINATED BY 'n' code . If your CSV file contains column headings in the first line of the file you can ignore it by specifying the IGNORE 1 ROWS code option. Having a native means of importing CSV data offers some definite advantages The LOAD DATA INFILE statement is optimized to import data from a file into a database table very fast . While you do have to create the database and table(s) first you only need to do that once for each data set. Once youve created your table(s) you can import as many files as is necessary. Importing Data using a Utility For databases that no not provides a built-in way of importing CSV data your best bet is to use a third-party tool. Of course this will largely depend on your specific database product as most tools cater to one database vendor in particular. Some tools target multiple databases such as HeidiSQL. It supports MariaDB MySQL Microsoft SQL and PostgreSQL. An even more versatile tool is Navicat Premium s . It supports MySQL MariaDB MongoDB SQL Server Oracle PostgreSQL and SQLite. It alsopatible with cloud databases like Amazon RDS Amazon Aurora Amazon Redshift Microsoft Azure Oracle Cloud Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas. Moreover it is the only product that I am aware of that can connect to all of these simultaneously. So in addition to being able to import from a file it can transfer data directly from one DBMS to another. The Import Wizard supports just about any format that you can imagine. In addition to CSV it can process Excel HTML XML JSON and many more formats There is a screen for choosing the record delimiter field delimiter and qualifier Navicat shows you the progress in real time Once your done you can save all your settings for later use. I have used the Import and Export utilities many times and have been quite impressed by both. Best regards! Adam