conversion from Excel to primary format

home

This may be done as follows:

1. Having created the Excel spreadsheet, use the 'save-as' option to save it as a 'tab-delimited text file' (text-and-tabs file). This will create a file something.txt.

2. You will now require the conversion program vssconv.exe, which you can download here. Make sure you put this program in the same folder as the files you wish to convert.

3. Start the program and enter the name of each file you wish to convert - you don't need to worry about the filetype, since the program takes this to be .txt. The program will munch through your data line by line, creating a primary format file something.tx0 in the process. When it has finished you can process another file or just hit to finish.

In theory, everything will go smoothly, but experience has shown there are a few common pitfalls, all caused by errors in the spreadsheet:

The date must be in the format 23-Mar-97 as in the example spreadsheet.

If you change the date format of this column, make sure you don't corrupt the year at the top of the file!

There should be no blank rows/lines in the spreadsheet/text-and-tabs file.