Getting data out of Excel

[Richard Gaskin]

Michael Julian wrote:

 > I used to be able to just paste, but nowadays (Excel 2011 Mac OSX
 > 10.7.4) the data come in as a long string, with six spaces where
 > a return should be and three where a tab should be.

That seems a silly format, even by Microsoft standards (ever looked at 
the bizarre range of variance among their own CSV export formats? <g>).

For example, what does the format look like if you happen to have three 
spaces within a cell's data?

If you paste into a text editor do you see the same pattern?

I'm hoping this is some odd anomaly in LiveCode, rather than one of the 
lamest design decisions I've ever seen from a company as occasionally 
smart as Microsoft.

Kay C Lan's suggestion should get you going, but I'd be interested to 
learn if the oddity is on Excel's side or LiveCode's.  If LiveCode, 
please file a bug report.

If it would be more convenient to import the file directly, Currey 
Kenworthy's been working on a nifty library to do that for Excel files - 
I don't see it on his site yet, but here's the link to his announcement 
on this list:
<http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2012-May/171751.html>

And if this is just for internal use, here's an alternative that's both 
free and written by sane people:

<https://www.libreoffice.org/>

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
  Follow me on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/FourthWorldSys