For your full 9-column GTF file, it is, as you have determined, tab-delimited for the 9 columns. In the ninth you can place any value tag pairs with semi-colon ; delimiter. Beware your excel produced file does not have hidden characters that can upset the balance. View your file in an editor that can show the hidden characters, or on the command line: cat -A yourFile.gtf | less to see the hidden characters. You should only see the 8 tab delimiters. --Hiram ----- Original Message ----- From: "Noa Sher" <noa.sher@gmail.com> To: "Hiram Clawson" <hiram@soe.ucsc.edu> Cc: galaxy-user@lists.bx.psu.edu Sent: Sunday, December 4, 2011 11:54:54 AM Subject: Re: [galaxy-user] there was a wrong link in my previous mail - gtf file issues Hi Hiram, I managed to extract the columns in a different order (albeit I did it in excel and not using command line) but then the 9th column (attributes) of gtf is what I had problems with Thanks noa