# Is it possible to convert RTF to Excel?



## snoozy

I've got a translated Excel spreadsheet which came to me as a RTF word doc. I don't know how the guy saved it that way, and it will take me FOREVER to cut and paste each line into Excel one by one! Is there a way to save the RTF as an Excel spreadsheet? Or paste everything wholesale into Excel?

Help!!


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## Kung

Eh....that's a good one. You MIGHT try resaving the file as a csv (comma separated value) file; and then opening that in Excel.

Barring that, I'd ask the guy to convert it himself.


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## snoozy

That (csv) doesn't seem to be an option in my Word.


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## Nevada

I don't believe that's possible. RTF is a cross-application word processing format. A spreadsheet application wouldn't know what to do with an RTF.

I'm wondering why you're asking. Do you have a large table in the document?


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## snoozy

The original document is in Excel. The translation came back as RTF. I want to put it into spreadsheet form - even if it is not in Excel.


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## PNP Katahdins

I don't have Word or Excel on this machine so can't try this until getting to work tomorrow. Can you insert tabs in the RTF to separate the columns, save as a table in Word, and then export to Excel? Maybe use Paste Special? Or format the table to look like a spreadsheet?

You may have to change fonts to a monospaced one like Courier or Consolas to make columns line up. That alone can work wonders in appearance.

I see a lot of this kind of stuff from student work that they give me to proofread and make look better for a newsletter. Each case is different. Sorry not to be more help right now.

Peg


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## Gary in ohio

Save the file as txt file then import it from excel.


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## Nevada

Gary in ohio said:


> Save the file as txt file then import it from excel.


Sure. It could be saved as text to keep from having to type the information again, but it will need to be manually parsed. It's going to take some time & effort to copy the information and paste it into the respective Excel cells. Depending on the size of the spreadsheet that may or may not be practical to do.


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## farmerbrian

Gary in ohio said:


> Save the file as txt file then import it from excel.


this is what I was thinking too. Highlight everything in the RTF, then ctrl-c copy it, then ctrl-p paste into notepad.

This will strip all formatting. Then open excel and open this text file, this should launch the text file import wizard in excel which allows you specify where you want the excel columns to be. 

If the text file data isnt horribly messy you can usually make this work by selecting the best delimiter (the character that tells excel how to parse the text into separate columns) If there isnt a consistent delimeter to use then you can kinda-sorta manaually specfiy where excel should split the text into columns


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## snoozy

The person who sent it managed to reconvert it. I have no idea how. It is rather long -- 436 rows. Which is a boatload of cutting and pasting, so I am very glad he was able to do it!


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## Gary in ohio

Nevada said:


> Sure. It could be saved as text to keep from having to type the information again, but it will need to be manually parsed. It's going to take some time & effort to copy the information and paste it into the respective Excel cells. Depending on the size of the spreadsheet that may or may not be practical to do.


If its just row and columns of data there is no parsing need, The import will take care of that. Just like CSV file, you can import based on other seperators characters.


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