[mso] Re: .csv
- From: "Greg Chapman" <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2003 22:40:55 -0500
But wait!! Don't go to sleep yet!<g>
Nah, this can wait till morning. I did mispeak earlier on the comma
delimiting issue. I said there was a standard. There ain't. It's just that
by majority convention, it's a good idea to separate the fields with a
comma and enclose the strings of data with double quotes (Oh no!! He said
it again!!).
On to your topic, yeah, I remember those tools. What a mess. No wonder I
hate databases.<g>
There used to be similar problems in converting text between platforms and
apps, too. For instance, many older apps merely placed a line feed
(Chr(10)) at the end of a line and only placed a hard return (Chr(13)) at
the end of a paragraph. Some used both interposed them. The result when
bringing those docs into a Microsoft application was the occasional,
oddball square character in the text. As you note, Word is pretty strong
at cleaning this sort of thing up. Didja know that on Unix systems and
traditional TTY (serial) devices, there is no such thing as a line
terminated with Chr(10) & Chr(13) (Word's combination of characters that
cause a new paragraph to start). Didja know that most systems are unlike
Microsoft systems in that a file is terminated with a CtrlZ character?
That character is formal notice that you have, indeed, reached the end of
the cotton-ppickin' file!
Onto Office specific ramblings:
Another thing I do with Excel because its behavior from version to version
is such a cock-up is to never directly open a CSV file. Quite often, even
with CSV files, I'll catch it stuffing each row into a single cell because
something confused it. So, instead, I use the Data->Import External Data
menu choice to select my TAB and CSV files. This gives me an opportunity
to tell Excel, that yes there is a delimiter and it looks like this ->",",
dammit!
Okay, go night-night.
Greg Chapman
http://www.mousetrax.com
"Counting in binary is as easy as 01, 10, 11!
With thinking this clear, is coding really a good idea?"
> -----Original Message-----
> From: mso-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:mso-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Linda F. Johnson
> Sent: Monday, September 15, 2003 11:16 PM
> To: mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [mso] Re: .csv
>
>
> And hey...in defense of Word over Excel....one thing I have
> always done with
> these unwieldy text files that people try to import into
> Excel from their
> proprietary database programs (you know them old dos based
> programs I'm
> talking about? Well, if you deal with Excel much, you might
> know what I'm
> talking about) Anyway...people are always posting to Excel
> forums saying
> when they bring this data in, it's all over the place in
> Excel (becuz of the
> comma problem Greg mentioned and a few other things)...anyway
> I ALWAYS tell
> them to copy it from Excel into Word and use Word's Convert
>
*************************************************************
You are receiving this mail because you subscribed to mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx or
MicrosoftOffice@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To send mail to the group, simply address it to mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To Unsubscribe from this group, send an email to
mso-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word "unsubscribe" (without the quotes) in
the subject line.
Or, visit the group's homepage and use the dropdown menu. This will also allow
you to change your email settings to digest or vacation (no mail).
//www.freelists.org/webpage/mso
To be able to use the files section for sharing files with the group, send a
request to mso-moderators@xxxxxxxxxxxxx and you will be sent an invitation with
instructions. Once you are a member of the files group, you can go here to
upload/download files:
http://www.smartgroups.com/vault/msofiles
*************************************************************
Other related posts:
