MEH is designed to work with texts that are contained in separate .txt files, or with texts contained within a CSV spreadsheet. If you have other spreadsheet formats (e.g., XLSX), you can simply “Save As” a CSV file for analysis with MEH.
Long, long ago, MEH was only set up to work with .txt files.There were a lot of reasons for this, but they’re mostly obsolete now. However, you may still prefer working directly from .txt files (I know that I sometimes still do). If you have a CSV file full of texts, the easiest way to get your texts from spreadsheets into .txt files is by using EZPZTXT, a simple program that does about 98% of the work for you. I had written a little discussion before about using some scripts (which I’ve kept on this page below), but it’s somewhat unnecessary to read now that EZPZTXT exists. Alternatively, you could tinker with one of the following scripts in R or Python: