County Data Help: How to Use .txt Format Data?

[Aaron Sauceda]

Hi Everyone,

I had to jump through some hoops to get it, speaking with several "naysayers" in my county assessor office along the way -- they call it the "rule of five," I hear.

Anyways, I was finally able to obtain the data I was looking for. However, upon "celebration" of receipt, I was dealt a crushing blow when I saw the file format I received was .txt. Trying to stay positive, I withheld judgement until I opened the file, but as expected, the file is absolutely unreadable. I work in Excel for a living, and am extremely comfortable with large sets of data - but I can't stress enough how poor this data quality is.

I asked my contact at the assessor, and he said most of their clients are mortgage companies who have the resources to "translate" these data files into something more useable. Does anyone have any experience doing this? I'd like to convert this .txt information I have into an Excel file, ultimately with the goal of mailing to these people.

I'd love to hear from everyone who has experienced similar data troubles as this -- please reach out if you've found workarounds to extracting usable data from these .txt files.

Thanks!
Aaron Sauceda