Well seeing no other responses, I'll take a stab at it, Syrilda.
I'm not sure I can replicate the info to which you're referring, but most
of the large tables from the Census Bureau are plain text files (probably
appears as an ugly Courier-like font). Use File-Save As to put the
Netscape-displayed data as a TXT file to your hard drive, from where you
can import it into Excel. If you're instead looking at HTML-formatted
data, it's probably best to
1) highlight the data,
2) Edit-Copy,
3) Paste to a Notepad window,
4) Do considerable clean-up to the text file, and then
5) Save as TXT file
before the procedure I suggest below will work. Good luck!
John Chamberlain Phone 800-972-2766 CORD 601 Lake Air Dr
Senior Associate Fax 254-772-8972 Waco, TX 76710
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Here's some hints on importing text files into Excel based on my own
experiences with the Text Import Wizard. If I confuse someone or restate
the obvious here, my apologies. ;-)
1. From Excel's menu, File-Open, change the file type to Text Files, and
find and select the saved text file.
2. You should then see the Text Import Wizard at Step 1. First, tell it
you want to use a Fixed Width method. (Note: If you can obtain comma
delimited or tab delimited files to import, this whole process will be
terrifically easier.) If you want to skip past the header rows, you can do
so here by adjusting the "Start-at-row" value. Click "Next" to proceed to
the Wizard's Step 2.
3. Examine (and change as needed) the Wizard's suggested breaks for the
columns of data, scrolling left and right, up and down, as needed to see
the data. If you have varied positions for the columns at various points
in your text file, Excel will have difficulty parsing the rows. You may
have to open the file in a word processor and do some clean-up work first.
Click "Next" to proceed to the Wizard's Step 3.
4. Examine (and change as needed) the Wizard's suggested format for each
column of data. Usually "General" works pretty well, but you may want to
force "Text" on the row labels, for example, to avoid having it try to
treat a row that has a number in the first few columns as a cell with a
"value." Click "Finish" to see how well it all works out as spreadsheet data.
Always check the import carefully, especially if it's a long file with many
rows. Never assume that 500 rows of data imported error free, just because
the first 40 rows look OK. If you have header/footer rows interspersed in
the TXT file to make a nice printout, for example, you'll have to manually
delete those rows to reap a clean set of data for plotting, averaging, etc.
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