import text file containing line breaks into excel

Question

I have a plain text file looking like this:

"some  
 text  
 containing  
 line  
 breaks"

I'm trying to talk excel 2004 (Mac, v.11.5) into opening this file correctly. I'd expect to see only one cell (A1) containing all of the above (without the quotes)...

But alas, I can't make it happen, because Excel seems to insist on using the CR's as row delimiters, even if I set the text qualifier to double quote. I was sort of hoping that Excel would understand that those line breaks are part of the value - they are embedded in double quotes which should qualify them as part of the value. So my Excel sheet has 5 rows, which is not what I want.

I also tried this Applescript to no avail:

tell application "Microsoft Excel"
    activate
    open text file filename ¬
    "Users:maximiliantyrtania:Desktop:linebreaks" data type delimited ¬
    text qualifier text qualifier double quote ¬
    field info {{1, text format}} ¬
    origin Macintosh with tab
end tell

If I could tell Excel to use a row delimiter other than CR (or LF), well, I'd be a happy camper, but excel seems to allow the change of the field delimiter only, not the row delimiter.

Any pointers?

Thanks,

Max Excel's open

Maximilian Tyrtania Maximilian Tyrtania · Accepted Answer · 2008-12-04T13:31:47

Looks like I just found the solution myself. I need to save the initial file as ".csv". Excel honors the line breaks properly with CSV files. Opening those via applescript works as well.

Thanks again to those who responded.

Max

import text file containing line breaks into excel

4 Answers