🚀 go-pugleaf

I missing something?  I cannot find a way to get excel 3.0 to output
to a plain ascii text file in a satisfactory manner.  I know I can copy
from Excel to other windows applications using the clipboard, or
whatever, but I want just a simple ASCII text file, the kind 1-2-3 and
Quattro Pro used to make for me before I switched to Excel.  

Three approaches I have tried: 

	1. Using the add-in FLATFILE.XLA:  This works pretty good, but all
	   text that spilled into adjacent blank cells in the worksheet,
	   does not show up in the ASCII file.  The entry is truncated
	   according to the width of the cell. 

    2. "File Save As" with "text" option:  Cannot find any tab to space
	   expansion that gives proper column alignment. Also many entries
	   have additional double quotes around them. 

    2. Set up printer as "Generic Text File": Here I sometimes get the
	   same single line printed three times in the ASCII file. Column
	   alignment is messed up and I could not fix it by experimenting with
	   tab to space expansion.  Plus, the end of line sequence is "0A 0D"
	   rather than "0D 0A" which completely screws up the mks vi editor I
	   have on my PC. (The screen shows up blank apparently because with
	   the 0A first (line feed) and then the 0D (carriage return) the
	   screen is wiped clean with each 0D.)  If I manually switch the
	   line feed and carriage return characters in the ascii file using debug,
	   then the text line shows up ok, at least in vi.  But I still have the
	   column misaligment problem and also see strange embedded
	   characters, etc.  Or if I use Brief or the Windows notepad editors,
	   the 0D 0A ordering problem goes away, but the column
	   misalignment and strange graphics characters problems are still
	   there. 

I suppose all of this is a result of Excel always being in the graphics
mode, and mapping to fixed printer character sizes doesn't work very
well.  

Or... am I missing something?  Is there a good (better?) way to do it? 

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Ken Fisher                          | kjf388%tijc02@uunet.uu.net
Siemens Industrial Automation, Inc. | UUCP: uunet!tijc02!kjf388
Johnson City, Tn. 37605             | Phone: 615-461-2125
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