Weird Pasting problem in Excel 2003 Win7 and XP

Hi All

What I have routinely done for years now is create tab delimited text file (automatically using a script). Some of these 'records' have spaces within, e.g a date<tab>firstname<space>lastname<tab>etc

The file is appended to and after about maybe 4-6 lines I then copy and paste that into an excel spreadsheet.

The tabs ensure that the data lands in the right column / cell and everything is great. I don't need to mess about with text to columns or anything, just a simple copy paste. This is WinXP version 2002 SP3 and excel 2003 11.8347.8403 SP3

But when I use the same excel file, the same text file, and try to paste into using Win7 x64 and excel 2003 (11.8105.8107) SP2 it splits the pasted data on the spaces and the tabs....

How do I stop it from doing this ?

My colleague has excel 2007 and it works as it should for him (like on my XP)

I'm going to update my excel install to SP3 in the meantime.

thanks

updated to 11.8169.8172 SP3 and it seems to work properly now .. Brilliant

Right, now this is weird. The versions of the programs I am using are still the same but the problem has re-occured. When I copy paste a string of character in to excel the excel on Win7 is splitting the text into each cell based on spaces and tabs.

When I paste into the same spreadsheet on XP system it splits the text only on the tabs and the data with spaces in remains together in the same cell ?

IS there some kind of option I have missed that needs to be set here ?

Have you done a prior Text to Columns operation, or a file import, that involved splitting on spaces too? You could try a spurious text to columns operation using just Tab as the delimiter and then retry the Paste operation.

I opened a new doc, did text to columns, and UNTICKED spaces as a delimter. OK'd it, closed the doc and tried pasting in the data into my original spreadsheet. And now it works again! Awesome. Did not know that setting affected operations outwith that menu function. Is that intentional do you think?

I don't know - I suspect MS would say so. I can see instances where I'd want it to do that, and where I wouldn't, so it would be nice if there were a setting to control it.