Convert Excel to Text File with Delimiter (2 Easy Approaches)

Text files consume less memory and are faster than Excel spreadsheets. Delimiters make text files more readable, especially those that have numeric data in them. To get a quick idea of the differences, please look at the following image.

How to Convert an Excel Spreadsheet to a Text File with Delimiters: 2 Suitable Ways

The following dataset contains the sales data of a shop. We will convert it into a .txt format with a delimiter.

Method 1 – Convert an Excel File to a Text File with a Tab Delimiter

Steps:

Open your Excel file and go to the File tab.
Click on the Save as option.
From the Save window, click on File type and select Text (Tab delimited) (*.txt) file type.
Choose a suitable location and press the Save button.

Go to the folder where you’ve saved the text file and open it.

Method 2 – Convert an Excel File to a Text File with a Custom Delimiter (Pipe, Comma, etc.)

Steps:

Go to the Control Panel. You can get to it by pressing Windows + R, then typing control panel in the search bar, and pressing OK.

Choose Large icons or Small icons from the View by drop-down button. All the features in the Control Panel will be visible. Click on the Region menu.

The Region window will appear. Click on Additional settings.

The Customize Format window will appear this time. Go to the List separator section and change the default separator to a Pipe ‘|’ delimiter.
You can type the Pipe delimiter by pressing the Shift + Backslash keys simultaneously. The Backslash key is situated just above the Enter key.
Press Apply and hit OK.

Press Apply and OK again.

Open Excel and go to the File tab.
Click on Save as and select the file type as CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) (*.csv).
Press the Save button.