Hi John,
My experience with .prn is limited to downloads from a
GEAC database. I import them as text documents and play to
discover what the delimiter is. Most times it is comma or |
Good luck
ray
Well, there's garbage, and then there's garbage. Exactly what sort of
garbage it is might tell people what's happening.
A lot of .prn files are actually PostScript or other printer output
files that have been sent to a text file rather than to the printer. For
instance, if you open the file in a text editor and the first line is
something like "%!PS-Adobe-3.0", then it's a PostScript file, which
Excel can't do anything with.
My apologies if I'm telling you things you already know.
I don't know what you did to create a prn file from your printer. What does
that mean? If you save a worksheet as a prn file, it's written simply as a
text file with lots of spaces to put things where they belong column-wise.
Has nothing to do with one printer or another. They've been called space
delimited, but they're not. They're really space-padded.
On the File|Print dialog, there's a check mark that allows you to print to a
file. These files are usually unreadable to the average human. (Unless your
printer was plain text!)
The file|saveAs, "formatted text (*.prn)" has the same extension.
There are two things here, I think. Using "Print to file" in the File -
Print dialog produces a data stream intended for the current printer, but
directs it to a file of the user's choice. This file can later be copied
directly to a similar printer. This would allow transfer of the printout to
a printer on a machine that doesn't have Excel. But I don't think it's
called a prn file. It doesn't use the .prn extension for the file unless
typed that way by the user.
When using File - Save As, and selecting .prn as the file type, it produces
a text file that's padded with spaces to get the layout of the worksheet.
It defaults to a .prn extension. That's what I think of when someone says
prn file.
That's my story, but I might not stick to it!
Earl Kiosterud
mvpearl omitthisword at verizon period net
-------------------------------------------
I agree with everything you wrote--except that when I do File|Print and print to
a file, excel defaults to .prn (xl actually puts it in the filename box in that
dialog). So the user has to go out of the way to change it.
And the file opening as "garbage" sounds more like this type file (to me,
anyway).
(I think we're in violent agreement. A phrase used in some meetings after both
sides finally notice that they're arguing for the same thing!)
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