Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Getting Input from a Text File.

Getting Input from a Text File

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated January 15, 2025)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365

3

True to its BASIC roots, VBA allows you to do file input on sequential files. This means you can open and read a sequential text file, loading the information from the file into string variables. The steps are simple. You only have to open the file, get the input, and then close the file. The following code is a common example of reading from a sequential file:

Dim Raw As String
Dim NumValues As Integer, J As Integer
Dim UserVals() As String

Open "MyFile.Dat" For Input As #1
Line Input #1, Raw
NumValues = Val(Raw)
ReDim UserVals(NumValues)

For J = 1 to NumValues
    Line Input #1, UserVals(J)
Next J
Close #1

In this example you should note that the first line read from the text file (MyFile.Dat) is assumed to contain a value that indicates how many items are to be read in from the file.

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ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (11115) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Getting Input from a Text File.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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What is four minus 2?

2025-01-16 04:06:33

Kiwerry

@Mark: While I would agree with you as far as new input applications, or, for example, in cases where the format of the are concerned, I see no point in changing a running system where an existing VBA application is performing satisfactorily.

Apart from that, VBA can be used to write text files as well as read them, which opens, for example, the possibility of exporting of a table of position data as a gpx or kml file.

2025-01-15 06:51:43

Mark

I suggest that VBA be abandoned in favor of the built-in Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) tool - PowerQuery. With it you can do all the rest of typical text file input functions like parsing things, setting up/processing date/times, etc.

2020-09-26 05:12:39

Kiwerry

A quick note for those who have data files in which line 1 doesn't contain a value that indicates how many items are to be read in from the file:
Enclose the read and process code in a while ... wend loop like this
While Not EOF(1)
Line Input #1, Datensatz
' .... do stuff with the string variable Datensatz
Wend

I use this for reading gpx or html files.

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