To automate that, you can use that python script described here:
Automate conversion txt to xls
Here is an updated version of the python script that will convert all the text files having the format that you described in a given directory to XLS files and save them in the same directory:
# mypath should be the complete path for the directory containing the input text files
mypath = raw_input("Please enter the directory path for the input files: ")
from os import listdir
from os.path import isfile, join
textfiles = [ join(mypath,f) for f in listdir(mypath) if isfile(join(mypath,f)) and '.txt' in f]
def is_number(s):
try:
float(s)
return True
except ValueError:
return False
import xlwt
import xlrd
style = xlwt.XFStyle()
style.num_format_str = '#,###0.00'
for textfile in textfiles:
f = open(textfile, 'r+')
row_list = []
for row in f:
row_list.append(row.split('|'))
column_list = zip(*row_list)
workbook = xlwt.Workbook()
worksheet = workbook.add_sheet('Sheet1')
i = 0
for column in column_list:
for item in range(len(column)):
value = column[item].strip()
if is_number(value):
worksheet.write(item, i, float(value), style=style)
else:
worksheet.write(item, i, value)
i+=1
workbook.save(textfile.replace('.txt', '.xls'))
EDIT
The script above will get a list of all the text files in the given directory specified in mypath
variable and then convert each text file to an XLS file named generated_xls0.xls
then the next file will be named generated_xls1.xls
etc...
EDIT
strip the string before writing it to the XLS file
EDIT
modified the script to handle the formatting of numbers