There can be times when you want to open a file in Excel, but the file is not an Excel workbook (does not have the .xls extension). Perhaps the file is a word processing document, from Word or Word Perfect, or maybe it is an e-mail or a simple text file.

Copying the data from the source file, and pasting it into Excel is an option, but this can be tricky if you have large amounts of information, or if you want to impose structure on the data.

Luckily, if you can convert the data you want to a basic text file, Excel 2003 makes it fairly easy to import it into a worksheet.

If the data you want is in a Word document, or some other word processing format, explore the save options for the file. Most word processors will allow you to save a file as plain text. Another option is to copy the data you want, and paste it into a simple text editor like notepad. Use the text editor to clean up the data and then save it as a plain text file.

Once you have the data you need stored as a text file. Open Excel and choose File->open from the menu bar. In the Open dialogue box, make sure you select the All Files, or Text Files option from the Files of Type: drop list, so you can see the text files that are available to you.

Choose the text file that you want to import, and click the Open button. This will invoke the Text Import wizard.

In the first step of the text wizard, Excel will try to determine how your data is arranged. There are two radio buttons shown under the Original data type heading. Choose delimited, if you want the imported data to be organized by delimiters (separators like commas, semi colons, or tabs) in the text file. Choose Fixed Width if the data in the text file is aligned in columns separated by spaces. There is an area near the bottom of the wizard dialogue box that previews the organization of the text file. You can also select the row where Excel will start importing the data.

In step 2 of the wizard, you can add, move, or delete column breaks as required.

You can drag the lines as required to adjust what the Excel columns will contain. You can also click to create a new line, or double click to delete one. Once the column breaks are set up the way you like, click Next to move to step 3.

In step 3, Excel allows you to select a format for each column.

You can click on heading at the top of each individual column, (the heading is General by default), and choose from the radio buttons to format the column as Text, Date, or General. You can also choose not to include a column if you wish. When everything is ready, Click Finish to import the data.

This is an image of the original simple text file.

This is an image of the same data, imported into Excel 2003.