Excel/text file problem. Any ideas?

[dickbaker]

I have a large text file of product descriptions by part number that I got from my distributor. I need to bring it into Excel and save it as a csv file.

After the first try, I discovered that Excel had cut short the descriptions on a lot of products. It didn't have to do with the length of the description, as some products had many sentences, and others got cut off after one or two. It must have something to do with the formatting of the text file.

I looked at the text file, and the full descriptions are there. I tried using an existing csv file with long descriptions, eliminating all but three or four rows just to make it manageable, and then importing the product description text file. It still cut off the descriptions, and on the same products. It's the same ones each time.

Does anyone have any idea as to what the problem might be, and if there's a way to solve it?

[lucy24]

Does anyone have any idea

File encoding or unauthorized characters.

That's my generic diagnosis of all mysterious text problems ;) Sometimes it really does turn out to be something as embarrassingly simple as a hard line break in the wrong place.

When it cuts off, is it always in the same place? For example: you feed in records 3 through 10, and something in #7 gets cut off. If instead you try records 6 through 16, does #7 still get cut at the same point?

[dickbaker]

The rows with cut sentences are random. There's no discernible pattern I can see.

You may be right about hard line breaks. With 53,000 rows, it would be difficult to find all of them. I need to get the text into some program that will strip out any previous coding.