Ariel
If they had a "very very helpful" link I would have clicked it. 
I shall look over it carefully over the next couple of days.
It looks like it solves 1/2 the "real" problem. That is not how to open a tab delimited text file with excel but how to create an excel sheet. That is really great.
The other half is how to do it on a Mac.
Hope to get some more feedback.
Trevor