problem saving as txt file

[Guest]

hello

i have following problem. i have following data:
account amount description (usually inv. nos)
3456 55.66 334466
6785 122.12 45678, 98456

i concatenate it , add spaces so that all items are in fixed position, copy
and paste special values to another sheet and save this sheet as txt file.

problem is that some description fields contain commas and these lines in
txt file begin with " character. so txt file looks like this:

3456 55.66 334466
"6785 122.12 45678, 98456

wich makes second line 1 character longer. I need all lines to be the same
lenght. it only happens where there is comma in excel.
is there a way to go around it.

thanks

 

[Dave Peterson]

Saved from a previous post:

There's a limit of 240 characters per line when you save as .prn files. So if
your data wouldn't create a record that was longer than 240 characters, you can
save the file as .prn.

I like to use a fixed width font (courier new) and adjust the column widths
manually. But this can take a while to get it perfect. (Save it, check the
output in a text editor, back to excel, adjust, save, and recheck in that text
editor. Lather, rinse, and repeat!)

Alternatively, you could concatenate the cell values into another column:

=LEFT(A1&REPT(" ",5),5) & LEFT(B1&REPT(" ",4),4) & TEXT(C1,"000,000.00")

(You'll have to modify it to match what you want.)

Drag it down the column to get all that fixed width stuff.

Then I'd copy and paste to notepad and save from there. Once I figured out that
ugly formula, I kept it and just unhide that column when I wanted to export the
data.

If that doesn't work for you, maybe you could do it with a macro.

Here's a link that provides a macro:
http://google.com/[email protected]