[[ Well, here is iWork Numbers 3.0, the latest version, and .csv files are no longer imported! Geez, what the heck is wrong with Apple these days? This is not a proprietary file extension, it's very common, and it's very annoying that it doesn't just recognize and import it properly.
Any help?? ]]
You can try opening the file in a text editor app that lets you see invisible characters.
First, change all the commas into tabs. (See notes at end)
Then, change whatever defines the "end of the record" into a carriage return.
Rename the file with ".txt" as the file extension.
You now have a "tab delimited" file which _may_ be importable into numbers.
If Numbers still won't import the "closed" file, try this:
- Open it again with the text editor
- Be sure it's in tab-delimited format (tabs separate fields within a record, and each record ends with a carriage return
- Create a blank spreadsheet in Numbers. Make sure it's "wide enough" and "long enough" to hold all the fields/records of the tab file
- Copy the tab-delimted file from one end to the other, select the upper-left cell in Numbers, and paste everything in.
- The tab characters will cause data in each field to flow into adjoining cells, and the carriage return will start a a new row.
NOTE:
It's possible that your data does not have "comma characters" actually separating the data -- this is why you need to make invisible characters visible so that you can see what is what before proceeding. I used "Tables" to save a file into "CSV" format, and found semi-colons used as field delimiters instead of commas.
I changed all the semi-colons into tabs, did a "copy and paste" as I have described above, and the data went into Numbers.
Important: you're going to lose any cell formatting when you do it this way. It will be necessary to check the entire spreadsheet and re-format cells as you wish...
