A follow-on from this thread.
In a nutshell:
[ul][li]Data is in Excel format[/li][li]Data needs to be in fixed positions in a .txt file[/li][li]Excel does this by Saving As Formatted text (Space delimited)[/li][li]There is a 240-character limit when saving this way[/li][li]Records tend to be more than 240 characters long[/li][li]MS-Access will give me a text file with data in fixed positions that is more than 240 bytes per record[/ul][/li]Now here are the problems:
As I said in the other thread, it would be helpful if numeric fields were… well, numeric. That is, I want a ten-byte field (say) that is right-justified and zero-filled. So instead of ‘12345[space][space][space][space][space]’ I want ‘0000012345’. There are a couple of posts in the other thread, but I have no idea how to use the information. For example, one says 'UPDATE table SET column = RIGHT(“0000000000”+10). That looks straightforward enough, only where do I type that stuff? Another suggestion uses some sort of function. (C++? Visual Basic? Java? I don’t know OO.) That’s beyond me.
And there’s another problem: I’m only using Access because it seems to be the only program that will let me save an Excel file as formatted text of a length that I need. I don’t know Access. Earlier I tried importing a file. It imported. Aside from the justification and zero-filling issue mentioned above, the dates now included time stamps. (Where did the times come from? Who can say? They’re not in the original data.) I managed to get them into MM/DD/YYYY format without time stamps. Only when I exported to text, they were M/D/YYYY and the time stamps were back.
As I said in the other thread, I can work with what I have. But it would be much nicer if the numeric fields were right justified and zero-filled (or at least right-justified) and if the dates would stay in MM/DD/YYYY format when I export to a text file.
And since I don’t know Access or OO, I’ll need step-by-step instructions.