The sed command didn't seem to do the trick. Copying the text and pasting into a new file in nedit did however seem to work.

I also discovered some perl script that converts excel files to .txt files called excel2txt
I need to use Excel to convert Presentation data to vectors because I want to examine errors and correct responses separately
Using this conversion tool made text files that could be read properly by awk.
From there I used a variant of your awk suggestion

----
#!/bin/sh -f

for i in 31 32 34 37; do
for j in 1 2 3 4 6 7; do

cat $i.tab.1D | awk '{ print $'$j'}' > $i.$j.1D

done
done
---------

You wouldn't believe the amount of time the new -stim_times option is going to save me. I have only just started using it, and combined with what we've been discussing above, it will eliminate many of the manual steps involving excel that I used to have to perform. To whomever is responsible for -stim_times, I salute you (or ye).