[geeks] Microsoft Excel

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com>
>Date: 2007/08/10 Fri PM 01:34:46 CDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: [geeks] Microsoft Excel

>For various reasons, I need to use a non-printable character as a 
>delimiter in a text file.  I thought ASCII fs (0x1c) would probably be a 
>good choice.  It works fine in my scripts and it's easy to generate in 
>Servlets.
>
>The problem is that I can't convince fucking Microsoft Excel to import 
>files delimited with fs.  I can't seem to even figure out how to get an 
>fs character into the clipboard so that I can try pasting it in the 
>dialog box.

Can you call up a file with an 0x1c in it you can cut,then paste into the import routine as your delimiter? I suspect Excel won't accept any characters under 0x20 (space character), based on other notes regarding MS Word.

Just a thought, but Excel can be fed with a database as a source, could you pipe your text file into a database, for use by Excel users? (may not be plausable if read/write access needed).

Any idea if you could have a macro execute when the file is opened? Just tossing ideas out at this point...

Lionel
>I'd like to avoid having to run a tr command before every time someone 
>wants to open the file in Excel.  Any ideas?
>
>Peace...  Sridhar
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