Today I want to show off a quick trick I learned many years ago that is useful to this day.
The Scenario: you have a spreadsheet, CSV file, or some other delimited flat file and need to load that into a database. There are many options to load data into SQL Server; however, a quick method I am fond of is to use Microsoft Excel and manipulate the data to craft insert statements then paste into SSMS and execute.
Read on to see how to parse and load a CSV flat file, character delimited flat file, and columnar text.