Intro
I recently wanted to create a tab delimited (separated) text file using
Open Office Calc.
Although this task is not one I perform often, it is
something that can come up from time to time. Really,
performing this task should be fairly straightforward
process.
I was a bit suprised though when I found out that
getting this done within OpenOffice wasn't as intuitive
as I expected it to be. Hopefully these steps will help
someone find the right answer quickly.
Font Use
I've put the actions you need to perform in bold
to make going through these steps easier.
Procedure
To begin, you'll simply need to have some data in an
OpenOffice Calc Sheet. From there:
- Go to File -> Save As.... This will launch
the "Save As" dialog window.
- By default, the file will be saved to the path of the currently
open file. If you'd like to save it elsewhere, you can do so
using the standard method.
- For "Save as type:", select "Text CSV (.csv) (*csv)".
This will automatically change the extension of the file to
be ".csv".
(Note: Although CSV stands for "Comma Separated Values", we will be
having OpenOffice separate the values by tabs instead
of commas in a later step.)
- Change the extension in the file name from ".csv" to ".txt".
- Click the checkbox next to "Edit filter settings" which is
a few lines below "File Name:". This will allow you to
tell OpenOffice just how you want the data to be separated
when it's placed into the text file.
- Click Save.
- A new dialog window will open called "Export Text File".
Change the value for "Field Delimiter" to "{Tab}".
- Click OK.
- OpenOffice Calc will now open the newly created text file.
- To make sure the file looks alright, check it out using Notepad.