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Overview of Importing

When importing data into excel, its good to know that most imported data comes from other sources which has data already exists and that has been produced either within a separate spreadsheet or from a separate application altogether. This type of data is called foreign data. Data can also come from sources that already exists within a spreadsheet, which just needs to be copy and pasted into the sheet. Importing data into spreadsheets has a number of guidelines in which a user will have to follow. There are a number of methods of importing data into a spreadsheet, for example:

• Tab-Delimited Data - which means the data that is imported has tab-delimited text, due to this numerals like "100" is
  taken as 3 numeral characters rather than a single binary number.
• Data/Lists - Is another method in which a user can import data into a spreadsheet, the data when being imported into the
  spreadsheet is converted to the preferred TD form using either a text editor or word processor, this can be edited by Search/Replace.
• Internet - Information in text form and HTML can be copied straight from the source into the spreadsheet.

When Importing Data, there are a number of guidelines in which a user will have to follow. The guidelines are:

• When saving foreign data, the tab-delimited ASCII will add a .txt file extension of the file.
• When users take data from the web, they must make sure the data can be copy/paste of tagged tables.
• Foreign data sometimes gets messed up when you directly copy and paste it into a spreadsheet; this is where the
  placeholder technique is used in order to place the .txt file extension when it is correctly imported into the spreadsheet.