Thank you Mr. Dastard,
I followed your suggestion (using pipe | instead of TAB). Unfortunately the text file produced by the Adobe Reader has single spaces instead of double in about 10% of the records. But only between the same two columns. There are even double spaces within columns with a double-name. Rather careless data entry. The rest of the double spaces are correct. Not hard to fix in a program (C), but it would required a lot of fixup in the "simple" approach.
It now looks as though I can fix these problems with a global find & replace on the text file.
I feel really stupid for not thinking of that approach. I was trying to use the double-spaces as the delimiter in the spreadsheet import utility.
Thank you,
seacue
Last edited by seacue; 14th Feb 2013 at 09:57.