Exporting fixed width columns

[tuph]

Our old legacy financial system requires fixed width columns, separated by commas, in the text files used for updating product prices. In Lotus there is a print to file option which pads out the columns with spaces and inserts a comma between the fields.

I know all about the Save as .csv and .txt options in Excel and even found the "Formatted Text (space delimited) *.prn" option. This option sounds the same as the Lotus option and it adds the extra spaces required, but it does not insert the commas to delimit the fields.

Am I missing something? Can anyone help, please?

[Bryan Hessey]

Our old legacy financial system requires fixed width columns, separated by commas, in the text files used for updating product prices. In Lotus there is a print to file option which pads out the columns with spaces and inserts a comma between the fields.

I know all about the Save as .csv and .txt options in Excel and even found the "Formatted Text (space delimited) *.prn" option. This option sounds the same as the Lotus option and it adds the extra spaces required, but it does not insert the commas to delimit the fields.

Am I missing something? Can anyone help, please?

Hi,

it's just not a csv format, so has no reason to put comma's in as separators.

.prn is the old standard (dot matrix-type) fixed width character output.

Not sure how you would output fixed width with comma, perhaps pull the whole sheet to a helper sheet with

=A1&REPT(" ",MAX(LEN(A$1:A$100))-LEN(A1)+1)

etc for each column, then output as .csv file.

hth
---added that's CSE to enter

[tuph]

.prn is the old standard (dot matrix-type) fixed width character output.

I did say it was an old legacy system

Thanks for the help, Bryan. I'll give it a go.