Tab (\t) is not recognized as columns delimiter when pasting into Excel 2013

I'm pasting data separated by tab, usually the excel would be a "little" cleaver and separate the data by columns at each tab character.

I don't know why, but Excel doesn't recognize the tabs anymore and I have to use the text importing tools every single time!

It is odd that when I copy data from excel to notepad, the columns are separated by tab!! But if I try to paste it back to excel, the data goes to the same columns!

It is a frustrating and very dumb behavior of excel!

Why it used to work before? Older excel version was clever than the new one or what? What can I do to fix it?

Edit: it seams that it can happen due to some excel bug. After a reboot the \t was working again. It happened another 2 or 3 times.

Solution 1:

It sounds like you may have recently used the "Text to Columns" function and changed the delimiter to commas or spaces or something.

When you do that, Excel continues looking for the new delimiter in whatever you paste in. To revert to the old behavior, just go back into "Text to Columns" and change the delimiter back to Tabs.

Solution 2:

This issue occurred for me after I ran a macro that imported data using the "|" character as the column delimiter. Even though I had closed the sheet that ran that macro, and closed all the sheets created by the macro, my other sheets open while the macro ran defaulted to "|" as the delimiter as well as any newly opened sheet. I solved this by closing all Excel sheets. Once I did that and then opened Excel, any newly opened sheet (blank or otherwise) again defaulted to using TAB as the delimiter. This was in Excel 2013.