No Text-to-Column ability

I agree completely. I would prefer to never use Excel again. Then I try to parse the tiniest of data sets in Numbers, a task that has to be considered the most basic of requirements, and it isn't even in the feature set. A quick search leads to hundreds of other bewildered users stopped in their tracks with the same issue. Where is the happy middle ground? You can't just be a new paradigm without being capable.

Thanks for that. You are correct, if the delimiter is , instead of - it splits them into columns and then there is a useful import settings screen that is exactly what I was looking for. It has a few preset delimiters and the ability to choose whatever delimiter you want. Perfect. But those import settings only appear if your original data perfectly matches one of the default delimits. If it does not, the import settings screen is nowhere to be found and from what I can see there is no way to invoke it. Which means Numbers isn't great at this if the data is already in the doc. It only seems to want to help if your data is pre-formatted outside of Numbers into what Numbers is willing to recognize. This could use some enhancing but thanks for getting me to a place where I can fit my data to what Numbers can understand.

Thanks Ian. I guess I got into a problem because I pasted in the data (instead of importing) in a format Numbers didn't identify as a data table. At that point I'm screwed because there was no way to call up the adjust import settings. As mentioned above, if I paste it in with , instead of - it does see the delimit and parse it into columns.

Sounds like a safer bet is to always import instead of pasting.