Number 277 - June 2006

Old Hands Manage Tricky Spreadsheet File Transfer
by Bob Thomson, Tacoma Open Group for Microcomputers
Member, and new TOG President, Carl Tenning, thought a spreadsheet containing dates, issue (month/year), title, source and author of past newsletter articles would be useful to our user group members. How often have you sought a past article that you know was in a newsletter a few months back but just can't seem to find it? Wouldn't it be great to have such a listing? Carl thought so. We used to have a capability to search our website by keyword but that doesn't seem to work anymore--at least not in the on-line newsletter.    Carl used Microsoft EXCEL to create and save a small spreadsheet file containing one month's worth of information. He then attached the file to an e-mail which he sent to me asking for comments and suggestions on the format and content.    I don't have Microsoft EXCEL on my computer but I do have the OpenOffice suite, which Sun Microsystems have placed in the public domain and includes a spreadsheet. With the OpenOffice spreadsheet I can open and read an EXCEL file. I read the file Carl sent made some comments and sent them back to Carl.    Then Carl e-mailed me that he could not find one issue of the newsletter. I brought up the EXCEL file in OpenOffice and entered the data for the missing issue saved it and sent it back to Carl. He couldn't open the file in EXCEL. In earlier versions of OpenOffice and EXCEL I could	open an EXCEL file modify it and close it and (I thought) it would retain the EXCEL format. In the current versions, however, apparently the format is not retained.    What to do? Both Carl and I are relatively old timers in the use of personal computers. (We both started with Osbornes using the CP/M operating system.) He suggested something that we both remember from the olden days, namely save the file as a CSV file. What the heck is that? A CSV file is a Comma Separated Variable file. The content of each cell in the spread sheet is displayed as ASCII text or numerics followed by a comma. It's not all a bed of roses. All formatting is lost but at least the data is there and it can (usually) be read into a spreadsheet program into the correct columns and all. Most spreadsheets and database programs will accept a CSV file and open it. It can then be saved in whatever format that program will handle. Both EXCEL and Open Office will save their content as a CSV file, as well as read one when provided.    As mentioned above, all formatting of the entries is lost when converted to a CSV file. That is, all column formatting reverts to the standard width, "centered" entries are no longer in the center of the column, bold-facing, italicizing and underlining, if any, are gone, special font styles and sizes revert to the standard for that spreadsheet, etc.    But what the heck, it saves all that re-typing! CSV forever!
Number 277 - June 2006