Is there a Numbers equivalent to Excel's "Text to Columns"?

Question

I am new to Numbers 09. In Excel I often need to take large amounts of ASCII text data, with hundreds or even thousands of line, paste the data into Column A, then use the "Text to Columns" utility to parse the data into separate columns for further manipulation, calculation, or graphing. Is there a similar process available in Numbers?

Answer 1

I found a way to accomplish this, assuming you also have iWork “Pages” available.
Paste your delimited text into a blank"Pages" document.  Do a Find / Replace on your delimiting character (comma or whatever) and replace it with a tab character. 
To do this, use Edit > Find > Find... and choose “Advanced” (at the top of the pop-up).  Your delimiter goes in the Find text box.  Then use the “Insert” pull-down menu to set the Replace text to “Tab.”   It puts a little arrow symbol into the text box.
Your original text probably has line breaks already.  But if it has a separate delimiter instead, you can convert them into the required line breaks in the same way, using Find/Replace to "Paragraph Break.".  Hopefully the same delimiter is not used for both row and column breaks in your data.
Now copy/paste that text from Pages into a single cell in Numbers and it should break it into columns and rows.
MS Office for Mac isn’t that expensive.  After this ordeal I’ve ordered a copy.