How to Convert Excel to Comma Separated Text

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to convert from Excel to comma separated text. Let's open up Excel by clicking on our start button. We go to all programs, let's find Microsoft Office, then we're going to open up Excel. I'm going to basically type some data on here, let's say you got a list of employees. Let's just put some names and their sales and these are really simple spreadsheet. Now we want to save this as a comma separated text file which is a different way of representing data in a spreadsheet. It actually takes it out of Excel format and puts it into a text format. In each of these cells and rows are separated by a comma. This is real good for transferring data between applications because it puts in a very simple format, it's easy to read. So let's save this as a comma separated by clicking on our Office button, go to save as and I'm going to scroll down to the bottom here and we're going to select other formats. Now at the very bottom of your save screen, it's at the top here because of my resolution, but we're going to select save as type and we're going to say CSV or Comma delimited. I'm going to put this on my desktop and I'm going to call it Book 1 saving as a CSV file. Now it's going to warn you that CSV files do not support multiple sheets and that Excel won't be able to open it up with multiple sheets anymore. I'm okay with that so I'm just going to click okay. It's going to tell you also that CSV has features or rather the Excel version of this has features that CSV or comma separated doesn't support. It asked you if you want to continue saving, just say yes. Our file has been saved and let's go to our desktop. As you can see we have now a Book1.CSV. If I open that up, that opens up in notepad because it's just plain text. As you can see our columns have been converted into text and they're separated now by a comma. My name is Dave Andrews and I've showed you how to convert from Excel to comma separated values."