title: copy paste of tab delimited text results in strange formatting in Excel?
body: <p>My source file is a tab delimited text file (*.txt). I am copy pasting from the *.txt to a blank *.xlsx workbook. I have Microsoft Office Excel 2010 installed on my computer. I have notepad++ installed on my computer. </p>
  
  <p>The tab delimited text files are normal text files using "\t" tab characters to separate numeric values in to columns. Example:</p>
  
  <pre><code>0   0   0.5528369
  0   1   0.0
  1   0   0.1230636
  1   1   0.0
  1   0   0.2113225
  1   1   0.0
  3   0   0.0752651
  3   1   0.0
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Using the same example, here is a screen shot showing the characters in the source file:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/05nBR.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>Issue #1: after copy pasting from text file to worksheet, excel removes tabs, squishing each row of text together, for example:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/F262r.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>As a workaround, I use a text-replace function in Notepad++ to replace each tab in the source text with a comma. This operation results in something that looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>0,  0,  0.5528369
  0,  1,  0.0
  1,  0,  0.1230636
  1,  1,  0.0
  1,  0,  0.2113225
  1,  1,  0.0
  3,  0,  0.0752651
  3,  1,  0.0
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>After copy/pasting in to excel this version with commas, I am now able to perform the excel function Data->Text-to-columns. However, there are issues with this, too. </p>
  
  <p>Issue #2: Text copy pasted in to excel is not treated as a number. Switching the type of the data from General to Number does not work. It remains as text. On closer inspection, it appears that Excel added white space to the end of each number, and this prohibits it from recognizing it as a number. For example:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/eMOM0.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>Currently I am having to hand edit each cell in excel to remove the extra white space, which enables me to set the type to Number.</p>
  
  <p>Both of these issues stem from performing trivial copy paste operations and I am at a loss to understand why they are occurring or how to resolve them in a straightforward manner. I would like to copy paste in to excel as described above without having either issue occur.</p>