I am extremely sorry for the confusion, actually I meant that let us say an application produces an output file. Is there anyway to get the data of file in an excel sheet without any manual intervention?
application ---> Flat file ------> FTP to an excel sheet
Joined: 31 Oct 2006 Posts: 1042 Location: Richmond, Virginia
A .txt file with fixed length fields can also be imported via the Excel wizard. You must open the file from within Excel via the Open command - right-clicking and choosing "open with" will not work.
Joined: 26 Apr 2004 Posts: 4652 Location: Raleigh, NC, USA
All of this is only speculation, but:
It seems to me that you can prep the file to a .TXT or .CSV or .SLK format, than transfer it to the server with FTP. From there, I guess you'd have to run a script, probably written in Excel, that would automatically open the file and import it as required, or, there are probably tools available that can be used to perform the formatting automatically.
Joined: 13 Jun 2007 Posts: 632 Location: Wisconsin
Always seems like a bother to me too. But when the clients say this report needs to be produced in Excel so we can massage the data... what can you do.
The Excel script thing becomes a pain in the neck because you need to have the macro installed on everyones machine who will open the text file, the .CSV is the easiest route to go because Excel opens them pretty well. Albeit without the pretty formatting that someone may be looking for, like centered titles, borders, shading and all that.
Joined: 26 Apr 2004 Posts: 4652 Location: Raleigh, NC, USA
It seems to me that the time is ripe for someone to develop a universal text-to-xls converter utilty, or for MS to get off their butts and use XML as the standard input format for all their products.
