There's a quiet frustration that builds when you're this close to a clean data import. The user in this story did everything right: followed the Power Query advice, prepared for a tab-delimited file, and still hit misaligned rows. That's not a failure of effort. It's the gap between a tool working and a tool working *for you*. And that gap is exactly where most spreadsheet users get stuck.
What we see in that screenshot is a familiar problem. EndNote exports structured reference data, but the structure doesn't always survive the trip. A few rows shift, fields land in the wrong columns, and suddenly the data looks like it's playing a game of musical chairs. Power Query is the right starting point, but it's not a magic wand. It needs a human touch to handle the edge cases that come with real-world files. That's not a knock on the tool. It's a reminder that learning to import data well is a skill, not a one-click event.
The practical takeaway here is that messy imports are rarely about the file format. They're about assumptions. The person who posted this assumed that because the import *almost* worked, the problem was in their setup. But the real issue is likely that EndNote uses optional fields or line breaks in ways that don't align with a simple tab split. Power Query can fix this, but only if you know to look for patterns in the misalignment rather than just re-running the same steps. For the person asking for help, the next step is to isolate one bad row and trace where the shift happens. That single investigation will teach more than a dozen forum replies.
We'd tell this user to stop treating the import as a one-time event and start treating it as a small project. Split the problem: first, get the file into Power Query as-is. Then, use the "Split Column" and "Reorder Columns" options to manually correct a few rows. Once you see the pattern, you can apply it to the whole dataset. It's not glamorous, but it works. The goal isn't to avoid the mess. It's to understand the mess well enough to clean it once and move on. That's the kind of practical competence that turns a mediocre Excel user into someone who stops fearing the import dialog box.