Open the machine readable file with EXCEL (1998 or later) and the import wizard should appear. On the import wizard's first screen choose the fixed width option for import. This window also lets you set the row at which to begin the import so you can easily skip all the meta-data header information at the beginning. The next screen is a GUI interface for setting the field boundaries. Click on the position of each boundary. It is possible to scroll through an input file with the boundaries marked and check the boundaries against the data. The major negative is that the GUI window is fairly of small and not adjustable but you can scroll horizontally and vertically to see the full data set. The last window lets you pick the data format for each column. The default is "general" which takes anything numerical as a number and interprets the presence of any other characters as text fields, however, you should use the format values given in the meta-data header. Finally, be careful in defining the column boundaries and check enough records to be fairly confident that the whole thing has been done right.

Many thanks to Bob Milkey for his EXCEL knowledge.