Rating: 5 

Version tested:  1.0

Textwedge is a program that splits text files (including CSV files) into smaller chunks.

Textwedge does this row-by-row in a number of different ways:

• Split text by “number of lines per chunk” (e.g. you could set row count per file to be 30,000 if that’s what you need)
• Split text by “chunk size” in bytes
• Split text by lines containing a certain search string (you can define multiple search strings for this one)
• You can also filter out rows containing certain search strings.
• Textwedge will (optionally) preview what it will do before doing it by marking out different chunks and/or lines that will be filtered out with different colors.

A lot of people ask about how to exceed the 65536 row limit in an Excel spreadsheet. The answer simply is: you can’t. At least not in Excel 2003 (the upcoming Excel 12 (2007) will feature 1,048,576 rows). As someone who works with data I often have to split .txt or .csv files into 65536 rows, which is the maximum that MS Excel can work with. I typically would do this with VBA Macros, but there are disadvantages to this: (a) the Macros often take a long time processing (b) they often break down if the file size being processed is too big. Textwedge has proven fast, efficient, and powerful in handling this task (see screenshot).

Go to the Sourceforge Project Page to download the latest version. Also check out the author’s home page.