Chapter 25: Importing and Cleaning Data
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FIGURE 25.2
Excel’s title bar displays the opened file’s name.Prior to Excel 2019, when you worked with a CSV file in Excel, Excel would alert you that were not working with a
native Excel file every time you tried to save the file. If you added formats or formulas, for example, they would be
lost if you saved the file as a CSV. Thankfully, Excel no longer prompts you for this change every time. Beginning with
Excel 2019, an alert about possible data loss is presented when you open the file, and you can tell it not to show the
alert again.
Importing a text file
One of the advantages of importing a text file instead of opening it is that you can put the
data into a specific range in a worksheet rather than starting in cell A1. In this example,
we’ll show you how to import a text file to a specific range, and we’ll walk through the
steps of the Text Import Wizard.Beginning with Excel 2019, importing text files is done through Get & Transform rather
than the legacy Text Import Wizard. Get & Transform is a powerful feature, and we discuss
it at length in Part V, “Understanding Power Pivot and Power Query.” For this example,
however, we’re going to use the legacy wizard. With all of Get & Transform’s power, it took
away some flexibility like not having a header row. It’s valuable to know both ways of
importing text files.Before we begin, we have to enable the legacy wizard. To do that, choose File ➪ Options
➪ Data and check From Text (Legacy), as shown in Figure 25.3. This will add the necessary
menu item for the next step.Figure 25.4 shows a small CSV file. The following instructions describe how to import this
file, named monthly.csv, beginning at cell C3.