Approach to Excel

[Jack Sons]

Hi all,

An 80 years old aquintance (former navy officer) of mine works since perhaps
1990 (or longer) with a database containing of all kinds of numerical and
non numerical data about extrastellar astronomy in a database program called
Approach. Records in that program have (like Excel) cell like data fields
but also memo fields that can hold unstructured text in large quantities
(e.g. 300 words in one memofield).

Is it possible - and is it very difficult - to bring the Approach data to
Excel?

Can anybody explain how I could accomplish that?

TIA

Jack Sons
The Netherlands

 

[Guest]

Well if you copy the data... go to Excel

PasteSpecial ---> Text

Then you should be able to chop that up using Text-To-Columns

I can't help you out that much unless I know how the data is formatted...
but once it gets on excel I can help you do anything with it.

 

[Dave Peterson]

If copy|paste doesn't work, maybe there's an option to export the data to file
with a format that excel will open (.xls, .wk*, .csv, .txt or .prn).

And if that doesn't work, maybe you can print to a text file (the generic text
printer may have to be installed in windows).

The output may be pretty ugly (headers/footers/page headers/line wrap), so look
at the output in a text editor (NotePad?) before you try to import it.

 

[MartinW]

Hi Jack,

I found this in a Google search 'lotus approach to excel'
along with quite a lot more.
http://www.smartcomputing.com/edito...=articles/archive/r0504/24r04/24r04.asp&guid=

HTH
Martin

 

[Guest]

I think MartinW has found the definitive answer. Now, depending on the
amount of text in the existing Approach comment (memo) fields, that data may
not pull into Excel smoothly in the .xls format - but I'd give it a try
first. If things get weird on you, then try using the .CSV format. The .CSV
format will preserve all of the text within it and it is a file format that
Excel can open with no effort and it may give slightly better results than
the .xls format.

If you guys get into this and it really starts giving you any headaches, I'd
be more than happy to try to help come up with a way to get it from a .csv
file into Excel if those memo fields are getting broken up or lost. You can
reach me at (remove spaces) HelpFrom @ jlatham site.com if you need to. But
I'm thinking that either the .xls or the .csv export is going to pull right
into Excel without problem. You'll probably want to do some formatting of
the cells that those long comments get pulled into after the import: turning
'Wrap Text" on (using Format | Cells | Alignment) and making the column wider
and rows taller to see more of it at once.

 

[Jack Sons]

Gentlemen,

I am most grateful for your help. I will certainly try all your suggestions.

Jack.