Conversting RTF file into Excel file

Can we safely assume that RTF stands for the commonly used Rich Text Format?

Can you explain in some detail what this conversion process means to you? Rich text format contains the text plus formatting information. I don't think that Excel can "automatically" read and interpret RTF, but the information is all there if you can program Excel to separate the text from the formatting information and capture the desired text + formatting information that you require.

This Wikipedia page may be useful in understanding what information is stored in RTF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format There are also several converters listed. None claims to convert to Excel format, but perhaps HTML or XML or one of the other formats will be more readable by Excel.

From there, I do not think that we will be able to provide any specific suggestions without a more specific, detailed description of what you are trying to do. A sample RTF file with the desired output as you would like it to appear in Excel would probably be useful -- maybe necessary -- to providing more specific help.

Good morning MrShorty! thanks for the quick respose and you are right it's Rich Text Format, the reason I wanted to convert the information from the RTF file into an Excel format is to read the information and transfer some of the data into my table in another workbook; I tried to convert the RTF into XML but the problem is the header (of each page) is not included and some of the information I needed is in that part.

How I wish I can provide you a sample data but as for company rule it is against our code of conduct.

I appreaciate any any recomendation you have for any format I can convert RTF that will include the Header and can be read by excel.

Thanks again.

Do you not need any of the formatting information stored in the RTF file (font face, bold, etc.)?

If the formatting information is not needed, then I would open the RTF file in a text editor (like Wordpad) that can read the RTF file, then save as a regular text file (*.txt). The .txt file will obviously not retain any formatting information, but all of the text information should still be there. Excel should be able to easily read the .txt file. If the file is in a delimited or fixed width format, then it should also be able to easily parse the text into columns using the Text Import Wizard or Text to Columns command.

Good morning MrShorty! I followed your advised and open the rtf in wordpad and save it as text and you are right all the information was there including the header and footer, but the columns is gone and all the information was aligned to the left. With the column is gone I have a hard time to identify which information should I pick up.

Did you parse the data using the Text Import Wizard or the Text to Columns command? https://support.office.com/en-us/art...b-534250ff9905

That is a tough format to work with, mostly because (as you explained and I failed to understand), everything ends up in a single column. A few thoughts:

1) I infer from the .rtf file that you (or someone) are generating these reports using Crystal Reports. If that is correct, I might go back to Crystal Reports and see if you can get it to output the data in a different format, other than .rtf. (https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/displa...+Visual+Studio ) This page suggests that Crystal Reports can output directly to an .xls file, or to a .csv file or to a tab-delimited text (.ttx or .txt) file. These formats will probably be easier to import into Excel than the .rtf format you are currently getting.

2) If it is absolutely necessary to work from the .rtf file, I would import the data as a single column just like you have it now. Then figure out a combination of lookup and reference functions to extract the desired information from the single column into the desired table format (https://support.office.com/en-us/art...__toc309306714 ). For example, =MATCH("*Agent Commission*",$A$1:$A$2000,0) will return 314, telling me that the "agent commission" section of the report begins in row 314. Then I can figure out other formulas to pull out the needed information from that section of the report.

3) You said that you had successfully converted to xml or similar, but lost the "header" information. It might be worthwhile to explore these .xml files and see if you can import them into Excel, and manually add in the header information.

The report are extracted from one of our application and the output send it to the online crystal report from there we can save it into html, rpt, xls, doc and rtf. I did try to export it into excel (btw it's excel 5) the header is gone but the columns are there.

If it were me, I might put this question to a Crystal Reports support forum. Why does the online version remove header information when saved to xls format, and how can you get the online version of crystal reports to include header information when saving to xls format?
Is it only the xls format that loses the header information, or do all but rpt and rtf lose the header information?
I don't know if it will help, but what data in the sample rtf that you sent is the "header information" that gets lost?