How to import a text file
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To import a text file, we just need to open our blank sheet, navigate to the "Data" tab in the ribbon, click "Get External Data", then select "From Text".
Once we select our text file, in this case "vacations.txt", we're then prompted with a box to determine whether we're dealing with a "Delimited" file or a "Fixed width". Our text file is separated with commas, so it's "Delimited".
If we were dealing with a fixed width text file, it'd look more like this:
Notice how each value is separated by an even amount of space? That's what fixed width means...
A fixed width text file has all fields aligned with spaces between each field values.
After we click "Next" with "Delimited" selected, we're prompted with a new page asking us to specify our delimiter.
In our case, our values are separated with a comma, so we'll select that option.
Say we had the following text file...
...where each value is separated with not 1, but 2 commas. In this case, since we'd have consecutive commas signifying a separation of values, we'd click the checkbox.
In short, the consecutive delimiters means that our field values are separated by multiple of the same character.
Next, we must specify what the data type is for each of the columns. In our case, the "Destination" and "Clout" columns are text...
...and the "Distance" and "Price" columns are number values. Since these are already specified as "General", we can go ahead and click "Finish".
Last step is to select where we want to import our text data, and in this case we'll just select $A$1 in the existing sheet.
Perfect! We've successfully imported our text file!