Is there a Numbers equivalent to Excel's "Text to Columns"?

I found a way to accomplish this, assuming you also have iWork “Pages” available.

Paste your delimited text into a blank"Pages" document. Do a Find / Replace on your delimiting character (comma or whatever) and replace it with a tab character.

To do this, use Edit > Find > Find... and choose “Advanced” (at the top of the pop-up). Your delimiter goes in the Find text box. Then use the “Insert” pull-down menu to set the Replace text to “Tab.” It puts a little arrow symbol into the text box.

Your original text probably has line breaks already. But if it has a separate delimiter instead, you can convert them into the required line breaks in the same way, using Find/Replace to "Paragraph Break.". Hopefully the same delimiter is not used for both row and column breaks in your data.

Now copy/paste that text from Pages into a single cell in Numbers and it should break it into columns and rows.

MS Office for Mac isn’t that expensive. After this ordeal I’ve ordered a copy.

I found for graphing large datasets that DataGraph (http://www.visualdatatools.com/DataGraph/) is excellent It has an import mechanism that make taking input from a file directly pretty simple.

Dave,

What you have suggested here is essentially what I proposed in my first response to Peter above.

You will probably be much happier in MS Office because if this rather small hurdle seems troublesome to you, you will no doubt find many other differences that you have difficulty accepting. iWork has a much slimmer feature set than Office. That's a plus to many users, and a turn-off to others.

Jerry