I get a file exported from an AS400 into excel, but it exports as excel 2.1,
and all the dates come over as text, and I can't convert. I have to save as
a tab delimited file, then import to excel (2003), which corrects the problem.

Is there a command line excel function to open a .txt file and then save as
excel without haveing to manually launch the application?

Well, it looks like a date, and there is no other characeters, but its not
recgnoized as a date. It's left justified, and when sorting, it sorts as
text - 01/01/07 before 03/03/06. and selected the cells and setting format
as text has no effect.

"Duke Carey" wrote:

> What do you mean, specifically, by "I can't convert." What's the format of
> the text -Excel cannot almost certainly recognize it and convert it to a
> datevalue.
>
> "T1 Red Alarm" wrote:
>
> > I get a file exported from an AS400 into excel, but it exports as excel 2.1,
> > and all the dates come over as text, and I can't convert. I have to save as
> > a tab delimited file, then import to excel (2003), which corrects the problem.
> >
> > Is there a command line excel function to open a .txt file and then save as
> > excel without haveing to manually launch the application?

Two options worth trying:
Copy a blank cell, then select your cells & edit/ paste special/ add.
or
Select your column of data, then Data/ Text to columns/ Next/ Next/ Column
date format: DMY or MDY as appropriate to your input data/ Finish.
--
David Biddulph

"T1 Red Alarm" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:75D1385C-D1C9-4D81-BC29-(E-Mail Removed)...
> Well, it looks like a date, and there is no other characeters, but its not
> recgnoized as a date. It's left justified, and when sorting, it sorts as
> text - 01/01/07 before 03/03/06. and selected the cells and setting
> format
> as text has no effect.
>
> "Duke Carey" wrote:
>
>> What do you mean, specifically, by "I can't convert." What's the format
>> of
>> the text -Excel cannot almost certainly recognize it and convert it to a
>> datevalue.
>>
>> "T1 Red Alarm" wrote:
>>
>> > I get a file exported from an AS400 into excel, but it exports as excel
>> > 2.1,
>> > and all the dates come over as text, and I can't convert. I have to
>> > save as
>> > a tab delimited file, then import to excel (2003), which corrects the
>> > problem.
>> >
>> > Is there a command line excel function to open a .txt file and then
>> > save as
>> > excel without haveing to manually launch the application?