Re: Looking for IDL code to read Excel spreadsheet

["Rick Towler" <rtowler(at)u.washington.edu>]

Unless someone comes up with some code to read .xls files I think your best
bet would be writing a VBA script within excel to export all of your files
to ASCII.  Visual Basic for Applications ships with all Office products back
at least to Office 95 and is an excellent tool for this sort of problem.  A
few tips: the help files are not installed by default.  Get that office CD
out and install them.  If your VB skills are weak, use the macro recorder to
learn how to do things.  When you record a macro, VB code is generated.  Go
back and examine the code for insight info VBA for excel.

The way I see this working is that you have an excel worksheet where the
first column holds the list of files you need to process.  Write your VB
macro so that it loops thru these files, opening the .xls file, exporting it
as an ASCII file, then closing it.  It should be fairly straight forward.

Good luck!

-Rick Towler


"John McFee" <jmcfee@dres.dnd.ca> wrote in message
994780527.158211@coyote">news:994780527.158211@coyote...
>
> I have a large number of Excel spreat sheets. They are in a very simple
format.
> There is a 1-line four column header, followed by four columns of numbers,
eg:
>
> Time       Concentration    Time2      Response
> 14:48:20   19.29            14:42:01   1.5
> 14:48:25   5.34             14:42:06   0.7
> ...etc.
>
> I want to read in the numbers for processing in IDL. I could, within
Excel,
> export the data to an ascii file, but there are a LOT of files to do. Is
there
> an IDL routine that will read a simple Excel spreadsheet like this? (To
make
> matters worse, I run IDL on a Sun Sparcstation.)
>
> I apologize if this has been covered in the newsgroup and I've missed it,
but I
> have looked in various FAQs and through the various IDL libraries and
archives
> on the Web and have found nothing so far.
>
> Thanks
>
> John McFee
>
> --
> Dr. John E. McFee
> Defence Research Establishment Suffield
> Box 4000, Medicine Hat, AB Canada T1A 8K6
> (403) 544-4739 (voice)    544-4704 (fax)
> e-mail: John.McFee@dres.dnd.ca
> --
> ____________
> Dr. John E. McFee                         | John.McFee@dres.dnd.ca
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