link help

[Guest]

Some program I use spits out a .dat file, even though it is a comma delimited
file. How can I link from another workbook to information in the .dat file
without opening it?

 

[David McRitchie]

In other words it is not an Excel file so you can't access the data
without opening the file. (Even if I understood the concept of looking
at a file without opening it.)

 

[Harlan Grove]

In other words it is not an Excel file so you can't access the data
without opening the file. (Even if I understood the concept of
looking at a file without opening it.)

....

People access values in closed workbooks pretty regularly. Do you understand
that concept?

It's possible to access values in closed CSV files using SQL.REQUEST and the
text file ODBC driver. I don't know the details, but there may be something
on this at

http://www.bygsoftware.com/Excel/sql.htm

Picking nits, SQL.REQUEST would open the file in background in order to pull
data from it then close it, but the file wouldn't need to be open in
foreground in Excel.

 

[David McRitchie]

Okay I see the point, they want to make it seem like a data base
application which would be already open elsewhere, and you will
not see any indication that the file is being opened to get a value.

 

[Guest]

Yeah... that's the gist of it. If it were an excel file, I could do it. But
I cant get excel to recognize the other file's format. I have been playing
with "DDE" stuff, which I dont really understand. Something like
"=excel|file.dat!'a1." It doesnt work. I cant tell if its syntax or the wrong
approach.

 

[David McRitchie]

Okay back to reality. The .csv (.dat, .txt, prt) files are text files
that you would see as records. In this case they are text separated
by CRLF (carriage return line feed) or more likely by CR or LF.
Excel is not going to parse them out to cells unless you Open
the file through Excel to also separate into cells using the
commas or other separator character(s). In other words it is
entirely unsuitable for referencing with cell addresses.

 

[Guest]

I am open to a different approach. Can I get excel to dump all of the data
onto a worksheet though "type" or "write" or some other expression?