Formatting reports for Excel

[Jim Hamer]

Chris,

I think it really depends on what your user is trying to do in Excel. If
they don't care about having the data put into cells for manipulation, but
just want to view the report as it was produced, then tell your user to use
a non-proportional font. Courier New is a good choice. That is what we use
around here, but our users use Word instead of Excel.

When we are going to work with the data, we use Tab delimited files. Comma
delimited will work, but you might get tipped up if any of your data has
commas in it.



At 03:41 PM 99/01/28 +0100, you wrote:
>Does anyone have any useful tips or tools for re-formatting text for Excel ?
>The reports (done in Powerhouse Quiz) look fine on a VT or to print, but
>oh-so-clever Excel has its own ideas about how to lay it out.
>
>'Sparse' reports with many cells left blank seem to be a particular problem,
>in that blanks seem to get removed.
>
>Someone mentioned rich text: would it help ? Is there an encoder for VMS ?
>Or is there a way to provide hints to Excel along with the reports, so that
>it goes straight into Excel all pretty, rather than needing lots of manual
>adjustment.
>
>I could turn it all into comma separated quoted text, but that's fairly
>tedious, and makes the report pretty unreadable except via a spreadsheet.
>I'd really like a report readable to both humans & Excel.
>
>Excel is the customer's choice, not mine, so I can't use a Powerhouse PC
>product instead: the reports are done overnight & emailed to the customer
>who wants to look at them with Excel first thing Monday morning.
>


Jim Hamer                                      Contract System Analyst
Dairy Farmers of Ontario                       (416) 489-3298
Information Systems Division                   hamer@inforamp.net
(905) 821-8970                                 Toronto, Ontario, Canada
jhamer@milk.org
http://www.inforamp.net/~hamer/
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