Excel printing help or printing a tab delimited file / form data

Factual Questions
1

I can’t seem to figure this out. So I seek your assistance.

I have a tab delimited (or .csv) file. The data is from a web based registration form.

The web based form asks questions of the sort:

Name:

Email Address:

Place:

Animal:

Thing:

etc…

The response is written to a plain text file using a cgi script.

Now I wish to print out the information that I have gathered.

So I imported the text file into MS Excel. All the columns were imported cleanly, with Column A being all Name:, Column B being all Email Address: etc.

This form has some 20 questions. So there are about 20 columns. There are some 50 registrants, so there are about 50 rows.

Now I want to print out this information in the following format:

Name: John Doe

Email Address: nospam@john.doe

etc., one page per registrant.

The thing is, I have tried but haven’t found a way to do it.

If I print as is from Excel, it prints columnwise… while I’d prefer a neater format as shown above.

But the thing is, I dunno how to do it.

The closest I came to success was using Kaztrix (formerly Instabase) database software. I imported the data into Kaztrix and it formats it neatly. Even prints it the way I want, but it prints only the first 10 or so questions/answers per registrant, i.e. it truncates the data during printout. Which is strange, but it does.

If you haven’t totally understood what I’m trying to do, let me know and I’ll give you an example or something. I’m hoping someone out there knows how to do this…

Even if you can offer some vague clues, I’m all ears.

Thanks.

2

By far the easiest way to do this is to send it to MS Access and just make a report formatted like you described. If you don’t have Access or don’t know how to use it, let us know. BTW, you can import straight from Excel to Access so your previous step won’t be wasted.

3

If you’re not familiar with Access, it might be easier to go into MS Word, and use a mail merge to produce your printout. I can’t give detailed instructions, because they’ve changed the routines a lot from Word 2000 to Word 2002. The concept remains the same, however: you set up a form letter in Word that uses your Excel spreadsheet as its data source. You’ll set up the form letter with “Name:” followed by the field code for Name from the spreadsheet (you’ll need a first row in the spreadsheet with titles for each column, which Word will then recognize as the field codes), followed by a new line with “Address”, etc. Then, you just merge the form letter with the data from the spreadsheet to a new document (or directly to a printer).

4

Thanks for your suggestions. Shall update you once I try them out.

5

Perfect. Just perfect, Shagnasty. Thanks so much. It’s the first time I’ve used Access and I had no clue it could do this stuff. It’s printed just the way I wanted it.

Early Out, thank you too. I’m sure your method will come of use sometime soon.