I know next to nothing about Excel. I am a graphic designer that needs
to be able to use a client Excel file (pulled from her Quick book
files) to create a catalogue. She admits to being computer illiterate
so she can't help me much here either.

She has literally thousands of items in this file. Her current Excel
file columns are broken out into an item name/number, a description,
and a price. For the catalogue, I need an item number column and a size
and/or color column, and a number of items per pack column. I sometimes
others depending on the product (they are all fishing tackle items so
there is a lot of variety.) In most cases the info is in a column, but
it's all in there together.

She also wants every other line to be shaded. I did manage to do that
to the file already, but I don't know if it'll keep that once I bring
it into my page layout program (QuarkXPress).

Is there any way to break these columns into additional columns without
going insane? It would be really nice if there was some kind of a
plugin that could do it as I am not that familiar with formulas, etc.
common to Excel.

Any ideas yo can offer for converting this Excel file into useful
catalogue material would be appreciated! I cannot fathom having to
retype this.