Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
Does anyone know if it's possible to export Numbers to a Tab-Delimited format? The only options I have don't include that, and I NEED to get my data into this form for another program to import...and really don't want to go buy Excel (which does this all the time).
Numbers-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.7.5)
1) select the table you want to convert to a TAB delimited file
2) copy
3) open TextEdit in your Applications folder
4) create a new document
5) convert to a plain text document by selecting the menu item "Format > Make Plain Text"
6) paste
save the document
1) select the table you want to convert to a TAB delimited file
2) copy
3) open TextEdit in your Applications folder
4) create a new document
5) convert to a plain text document by selecting the menu item "Format > Make Plain Text"
6) paste
save the document
Grey,
There are probably many ways to do this, but I'll just offer this one:
Click on the Table Name in the Sheets Pane - that selects the entire table as an object.
Command-C to copy the table.
Open a New (blank) TextEdit document.
In the TextEdit menu line, select Format > Make Plain Text
Command-V to Paste your table data into TextEdit.
You now have a Tab-Delemited file. Save it and use it as required. Be sure to edit the file extension so your receiving document gets what it is looking for.
Regards,
Jerry
I like your idea đ
Wayne Contello wrote:
I like your idea đ
Yes, pretty similar. đ
This was one of thos posts where I had a couple of little interruptions and time flew by as I tested my workflow. Normally I check before finializing the post but I lost track of time. I was surprised to see that you were there ahead of me. My guess is that you were working away on your solution before I even read the question.
Greymantle should be confident in the solution.
Jerry
Thanks, perfect!
I have been looking for this answer all afternoon!! Thanks guys!
This ALMOST works.
You will still see a problem if you have quotes (straight, not curly) in your text. When copying to clipboard Numbers "escapes" these (double quote) as per CSV behavior.
There's no way to escape this behavior, which is something between a bug and bad design choice. If you export as XLS and open in Preview then copy to plain text you avoid the "" but get an extra space.
Numbers needs more export formats -- especially tab delimited.
As you imply, using "Smart" quotes avoids the issue.
If you have to use dumb quotes, pasting into Pages and using
Menu > Format > Table > Convert Table to Text
will produce tab delimited text without the extra quotes.
Situation is worse.
It seems CSV-like quotes escaping itself is not correct in some cases.
E.g., Given column A as follows:
A1 "a"
A2 a"a"
A3 "a"a
A4 a"a"a
A5 a"a
copy-paste to plain text and the result will be:
"""a""
"a""a""
"""a""a"
"a""a""a"
"a""a"
The first 2 lines are quoted wrongly. They should have been:
"""a"""
"a""a"""
However, when you export it to CSV from menu, the result is correct.
Tested with Numbers 2.0.5 under 10.6.5.
Regards,
H
Not able to paste Numbers 3.x into Pages 5.x or Text Edit using Mavericks.
Here is my sub-optimal solution:
1. While in numbers do a global replace of all instances of "," with ":comma:" (without the quotes)
2. Export as CSV
3. Open in a text editor as plain text or use BBEdit or some other decent plaintext editor such as TextEdit (Make sure you Format > Make Plain Text first)
4. Do a global search & replace all instances of "," with "\t" and ":comma:" with "," using regular expressions enabled for the \t or a tab character if not needed by the text editor.
5 Save as .txt
Not ideal, but works.
Not able to paste Numbers 3.x into Pages 5.x or Text Edit using Mavericks.
Works fine here in Numbers 3.0. Select the cells in a Numbers 3.0 table, command-c, and in TextEdit command-v. Can command-v into Excel too.
SG
tab-delimited format
