File format specification

[Nick]

Can anybody please recommend a document giving the detail of the ASCII file
specification relating to the importation of data into EXCEL from an
external application

Thank you very much

 

[Dave Peterson]

I'm not sure I understand your question. Wouldn't the specification be
dependent upon the layout of the text file.

And text files could have lots of different formats.

 

[Nick]

Dear Dave,
Thanks very much for your response...My problem is that we have an auxillary
application that updates EXCEL files via a standalone EXE developed locally.
We need to make changes to this EXE but have since discovered that the
original source code is not available. Hence we have to re-invent the wheel
so to speak. We have limited resource expierience with respect to Microsoft
EXCEL technology and were wondering whether a "standard" interface
technology exists with EXCEL that will aloow us to create an EXCEL Worksheet
from an auxillary exe based on a "standard" ASCII text file format with out
the need for the end user to launch EXCEL and follow the manual process
steps..

Any advice and guidance in this regard would be appreciated

Thanks

 

[Dave Peterson]

If I were doing this, I think I'd either ask for a text file (fixed width or
delimited in some fashion). Even a comma separated value (.csv) would be easy
to work with in excel.

Chip Pearson once posted this link:
http://www.enstimac.fr/Perl/perl5.6.1/site_perl/5.6.1/Spreadsheet/WriteExcel.html

You can look at section 14 of this FAQ for more info:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/spreadsheets/faq/

I don't think that creating a real .xls file is for the faint of heart or weak
of spirit.

I would go with the text file and do a little more manipulation completely
within excel (after importing).

And I think your standard would boil down to deciding on fixed width or CSV.
After that, it's just a little recorded macro that imports the data into excel
(with modifications to make it more general and efficient).