I am looking for a program/method of converting delimited comma data
into excel.  The information I am specifically seeking to convert is
an cftc.gov report called commitment of traders available at:
http://www.cftc.gov/dea/newcot/deafut.txt

Much thanks upfront.  I am willing to   t i p   very generously for an answer.

Hi, thanks for asking Google Answers.

Probably the simplest way to do what you want is to go to the Web
page, click on Edit and then on Select All.

Then copy using Ctrl-C

Now open your text editor, such as WordPad (NOT Microsoft Word which
will insert a ton of useless data in the file) and copy the text to
the page. (Every computer with Excel will almost certainly have
WordPad also).

Save the page as a .txt file. (File, Save or Save As.., then choose a
name and directory along with the ?Text Document? file format.)

Now open a new Excel worksheet and don?t enter anything in it.

Click on Data, Import External Data, Import Data
 
This brings up a dialog box ?Select Data Source?

Simply navigate to the correct directory and choose your newly created
xxx.txt file.

This brings up the Text Import Wizard.

On Step 1 of 3 Choose delimited (the usual default) for the file type.

Click NEXT

On Step 2 uncheck Tab and check Comma under the Delimiters dialog section.

Click NEXT

On Step 3 of 3 of the Text Import Wizard and select a column data
format - General is probably what you want.

Click FINISH

I don?t know of any URL I can point you to for exactly this
information, if you consider this a violation of the rules for answers
then I apologize but I knew the answer and have just tested it on an
XP Pro system running Excel 2002. I know it works on other versions
also. I often import data of this type into Excel and use the
spreadsheet more as a special word processor than as a spreadsheet.
Publications often use Excel to format large charts even when they
only contain text.

You will probably want to just follow these directions, then edit the
particular columns to get exactly what you want, but the steps I
detailed above will produce a chart which extends to column DY and row
68. It appears to me to separate all of the data correctly into
individual cells, including those few which have no numeric content.

I hope you find this useful and consider it a complete answer to your
question. I would be happy to simply send you a copy of the file I
generated but there is no way to do that here.

Although the particular Web page you indicated only contains data, you
can also select data using the usual mouse control to capture just
part of a web page containing this sort of data.

It will normally be easier to just capture the entire page and edit
out the ?waste? data later in the spreadsheet.

Here is a general location for How-To articles on Excel:

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/excel2004/using.aspx?pid=usingexcel2004

Google Search String:

site:www.microsoft.com using excel

://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=site:www%2Emicrosoft%2Ecom+using+excel

I hope this was helpful. If it doesn't produce exactly the format you
want it is easy enough to refomat in Excel or you can test different
options in the Text Import Wizard.

That was incredibly fast!  Spiffing job.  It works perfectly. 
Siliconsamurai-ga thank you so much.  I hope my future questions will
be answerd in the same manner as they where today.

If any google answers users (or prospective users) are reading this I
hope you get siliconsamurai-ga to answer your questions.

Once again thank you, more then I exspected :)  !!

right-click on the link, and "save target as" then open with Excel
using the above information helps as well.

That will certainly work, but only in some cases which is why I didn't
mention it. If that is the ONLY page you ever wish to import then the
suggestion from crythias will certainly save some time. Just begin my
procedure after you save the file.

"Save target as" generally produces an HTML file because most Web
pages are in HTML format. It only works in this specific instance
because the URL is a .txt page but if there were any graphics or
embedded HTML code at all then it wouldn't work.

It also won't work if you have the URL in a local document.

My suggested procedure is far more general and will work on most Web
pages where data is displayed in a similar format as long as you can
highlight just the data you wish to import, generally even if other
code clutters up the page.

In any case, when it is a .txt page on the Web, that process saves the
entire page and in many instances you will only want to capture and
import a portion of the page, especially the usual site which will
include graphics.

Personally I prefer to preview any information on the Web before I
download it into my computer but that's probably just a matter of
personal choice.

crythias-ga thank you for your comment your technique will greatly
improve the time required to import the data I seek.

Happy to help, thanks for the nice comments and the very nice tip.

I feel certain you and others will be just as pleased with answers
from other Google researchers I just happened to be especially
familiar with this particular problem.