Forum Discussion
Move .csv data from the web to Excel on Mac
JackLanders Which instructions are you referring to and what exactly are you trying to do? And from which web page, for example?
It is a Microsoft page. At the top it says "Import or export text (.txt or .csv) files.
The data I'm trying to import were from GitHub. The data originate with The NY Times. I has daily COVID new cases and new deaths by State and County. It is about 10,000 rows. I tried copying and pasting into Excel. I got all the data but it was all in the first column. Then I reread the directions and thought that maybe if I first put the file (I did just a few rows to see if this approach would work) into Word, that might work. But it didn't.
Thanks for your reply.
JackLanders On a Mac myself! Followed in your footsteps and found some NY Times covid data on Github. First, I just clicked on a link that produced raw data. Copied what I saw on the screen (cmd-C) and pasted it directly into an empty Excel sheet (cmd-V). All in one column as you said. But, no worries, then you can use Text-to-columns to split the data into columns using the comma as the separator.
The MS support page suggests that you have a csv file on your system. I could download the NY Times covid files by pressing the "Clone or download" button (see picture below). It downloaded a zipped file with several csv files. Unzipped it and then they can be opened like any other Excel file. Excel recognises the commas as column separators and guesses what data types you are importing. Or you go the Data - From Text way. This will connect to the file and then use the Text-to-columns view to let you split the data and determine data types before importing and putting it into columns. Good luck!
