Hi John,
The mainframe people really love it when someone takes their
data, brings it into a spreadsheet on a PC, manipulates it a little
and asks someone to take the modified data and put it back to
the mainframe. Not just kidding, I've seen it in action where
someone wants to multiply the value in one field by a constant
that they want to determine.
You probably want to get your data as a comma separated file (.csv)
from a mainframe program, if that is feasible. Otherwise you
might get it from a report without titles that has data lined up
in columns (a .txt file). In Excel you open the file and Excel
will check the file extension and act on .csv and do it's thing
or if a .txt file extension, then get the Text Import Wizard.
Programs such as SAS run on both mainframe and PC so are
very good at creating .csv files. Programs such as COBOL
are at the other end of the scale. But you sound like you are
getting data directly from a database. You should be able to
work with whatever you have, or get provided to you, one way or another.
You do want to make sure that you get text data only, so it can
be converted properly from EBCDIC to ASCII. No binary or
packed decimal data.
If you have a .csv file extension and don't like the way Excel handled it
change the extension to .txt and then open in Excel, then you
can tell Excel what each column is.
]
If you do this on a regular basis like your once a month, you could
record a macro starting with the opening of the file.
John said:
I've never imported data from the mainframe before. If you can offer some advice as to how to go about this I'd really appreciate
it. Here's what I'm looking to do. There's a database on the mainframe where I would like to take information from and have it
plugged into a ready-made spreadsheet once a month. How do I go about connecting to the mainframe from Excel and how do I get the
information to insert into a spreadsheet I made?
