How to Open a PRN File in Excel
A PRN file is a printer file that contains the instructions for printing a document. Excel cannot natively open PRN files, but there are a few ways to do it.
A PRN file is a printer file containing instructions for a printer, not a standard data file. While Excel cannot directly open a PRN file in the way it opens an Excel workbook, if the PRN file happens to contain structured text data (which is uncommon), you might be able to import that data using Excel’s text import features.
One method is to use the Open dialog (File > Open) and select Text Files (*.txt; *.csv; *.prn) from the file type dropdown. This will attempt to interpret the PRN file as text. If this method doesn’t produce the desired result, you can use the Text Import Wizard (Data > Get Data > From Text) or Power Query (Data > Get Data > From Text/CSV), which offer more control over how the text is parsed and imported.
If the PRN file contains structured text data that Excel successfully imports, you can then work with the imported data as you would with any other Excel data.
However, PRN files are not designed for data storage, and the success of this import depends entirely on the file’s content. There are no size limitations imposed by Excel specifically for PRN files; the usual Excel file size limits apply to the resulting workbook after import.
If the import is unsuccessful, it’s highly likely that the PRN file does not contain structured text data suitable for import. In this case, you will not be able to use Excel to directly extract data from the PRN file. You may need to use a different tool or method designed for interpreting printer instructions or consult the software that generated the PRN file to obtain the data in a usable format.
