Excel 2007 : Need to imitate Lotus character spacing in columns

Lotus measures column width in spaces that you would have if you use a fixed font like Courier New. In addition, when you extract ranges into a text file, any spaces to the left of a number in the column are included in the text file. For instance, if you have a column width of 15 and you put the number 123.0000 in a cell as text, there will be 7 spaces to the left of the number put in as text. I though that I once found a way to convert Excel to the character spacing that Lotus uses, but I can't find how to do it. Is there a way to do this in Excel 2007?

Our problem is that we load data from Lotus spreadsheets into an SQL database using a template with fixed spacing in each field. For example, a line in the text file that puts 3 values in 3 years starting in 2008 needs to be spaced something like:


CRAUSAC--VAA2008000 3P 1234.0000P 4567.0000P 7890.0000 0.0000

I can't even replicate the spacing here. There should be 15 spaces in each number field with the number of blanks to the left of the number varying to maintain the 15 space width. This is a real problem because we won't be able to use Lotus much longer in our agency.

Set the column width to the required number of characters and then save as prn file type.

The font face and size used in excel is irrelevant.

I get the same 15 character spacing using CooperPlate size 18 as I do with Courier New 10.

The outputted file has no font information. The font used to view the output is dependent on the application used.