[nissimk]

I still prefer Excel to esoteric regular expressions in vim for parsing complex text to copy paste. For example extracting individual pieces of data from a bunch of log file lines or reformatting text into syntax valid in some programming language.

You can work up the correct syntax in the top cell with mid, left, right, etc. And then just copy down once you have it right and copy the resulting values to your editor.

There's also "text to columns" for parsing separated or fixed width text.

[anjakefala]

If you pipe your output into VisiData[1], it will structure fixed width text for you into a tabular form. =)

Just type `blah | vd -f fixed`

[1] http://visidata.org/