Can REV create Excel files?

[Jim Ault]

On 3/2/07 3:21 PM, "Ken Ray" <kray at sonsothunder.com> wrote:>
> Can you just write out your tab delimited data to a file with an
> extension of ".xls"? On a Mac, double-clicking it launches Excel and
> opens it as if it were a "true" Excel worksheet...
> 
> Give it a try and see if it works! If so, it's the easiest solution. :-)

The only real catch I have found to the text file named as ".xls" is that
Excel insists on figuring out what you 'meant' to have imported and changes
are made to values.

Ken, I will have to admit that I am not using the latest Excel on my various
computers, so this may be the *real* gotcha for me.

When saved as a tab delimited file.xls, here are some examples of data
modifications I see:

a data point of "2-18" => date serial number of Feb 8th
sometimes dates have the year adjusted +/- 4 years
dates have their formats are re-adjusted but not always
leading '-' signs are interpreted as "this is a formula not a value"
leading '+' signs as indicators are removed
a "/" will be interpreted to be division
street addresses are changed depending on their content
embedded commas and quotes give unexpected results.
decimal values appear rounded to the default setting for Excel app

Things could be different now.


Jim Ault
Las Vegas

On 3/2/07 3:21 PM, "Ken Ray" <kray at sonsothunder.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 02 Mar 2007 10:55:20 -0800, Sadhunathan Nadesan wrote:
> 
>> Problem:
>> 
>> This file will be "text" (fixed column width) which then has to be
>> "imported" into Excel.  That works fine but it's extra steps for the
>> user to go through the import process and set the column markers to do
>> the imports (there are a lot of columns!).
>> 
>> Solution:
>> 
>> Anyone know of a plugin or feature in REV that will let us write out
>> .xls files directly?
> 
> I tried this on a Mac and it worked well, so I'm hoping it works on XP
> as well:
> 
> Can you just write out your tab delimited data to a file with an
> extension of ".xls"? On a Mac, double-clicking it launches Excel and
> opens it as if it were a "true" Excel worksheet...
> 
> Give it a try and see if it works! If so, it's the easiest solution. :-)
> 
> Ken Ray
> Sons of Thunder Software, Inc.
> Email: kray at sonsothunder.com
> Web Site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/
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