Excel files can be a pain to keep organized. They can be difficult to read and understand, and they can take up a lot of space on your computer. If you’re looking for a way to export your Excel files without having to worry about comma separators, you might want to try Pipe (or other delimiters). This way, you can easily keep track of which cells are which in your spreadsheet, and you don’t have to worry about forgetting which cells are which. Here’s an example: Export My Spreadsheet as an Excel File To export your spreadsheet as an Excel file, follow these steps:1. Open the excel file that you want to export.2. Choose the “Export” tab3. In the “File Name” field, enter “my_spreadsheet.xls”.4. Click the “Export” button5. The exported spreadsheet will be saved in the same directory as the original excel file
Naturally, this isn’t the type of article that most people will need to use, hopefully ever—but if you do need to know how to do it, the solution isn’t really obvious at first.
Exporting Excel Files as Pipe Delimited
For the purposes of this example, we’ll use this silly little Excel file.
To save the file as Delimited, you’ll need to click the Office button and choose Save As –> Other Formats.
Then select CSV (Comma delimited)(*.csv) from the drop-down list, and give it a name.
Now here’s where the interesting part happens… Excel by default will use a comma as the delimiter, but if you open up Control Panel –> Region and Language, and then click the Additional settings button on the bottom…
Now look very closely at the “List separator” item, which normally has a comma in the field, but for the purposes of illustration I’ve switched it to a Pipe character.
Once you hit Apply, and then save your Excel file, you’ll notice that your file now has pipe characters as the delimiter.
You’ll probably want to change the List separator back to a comma just in case some other application needs it.
RELATED: How to Export a CSV file from MySQL Command Line
