Question on Excel and Shopsite

[Andy Fredrick]

The background on the situation:

I've been using various versions of Excel up to and including 2000, and
they all have a bug when creating comma delimited file that basically
leaves out a few commas, which caused me to hand edit with a hex editor
all the files to upload to Shopsite, and then later shell out for a copy
of Corel Wordperfect Office so I could have Quattro Pro. Now I work in
Excel, close the document, load it in to Quattro Pro and save it in
comma delimited format, which works. The big problem is that the
process is tedious at best, and frankly I do not like Quattro Pro. It
is slow and causes a lot of memory leaks on my system, for reasons I am
unsure and not willing to invest the time to investigate; it also has
caused errors that require me to reboot my system, and frankly I don't
like to reboot my system, and keep most on in power save for instant
access.

My questions are as follows:

1. Has anyone been using the newest Excel and know if MS has fixed the
problem with exporting to a comma delimited format? I know this is not
a shopsite problem, but perhaps someone else has had luck and provide me
information so I can decide if I should upgrade to the new Office.

2. As an aside to Lauren/Jim, is it possible and not so costly for
Shopsite to support the .xls file format directly for upload/download
instead of just comma delimited? I know that comma delimited is a very
generic format which has a lot of benefits in terms of what kind of db
you can import to and certainly should not be dropped( I use other dbs
for other sites, but all of them will support .xls), but for most of my
products and pages work I find I don't really need to be in a db. A few
of the customers on some of my sites only get information from vendors
in xls format. It would be nice if there was direct .xls support.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Andy Fredrick
MarketPath, Inc.
In beautiful Boise Idaho

[Michael Nance]

I am using Excel 2000 and I have had similar problems saving files in tab
delimited format and ending up with extraneus quotation marks. The work
around that I have found to work is to import the tab delimited Excel file
into an Access table and then save it as a text file (you will of course
need Access). You will have several options to choose from when saving the
file. Select none for "text qualifier" and Access will strip out all of the
offending quotion marks.

"Andy Fredrick" <andy@marketpath.com> wrote in message
news:4011A187.669A7381@marketpath.com...

The background on the situation:

I've been using various versions of Excel up to and including 2000, and
they all have a bug when creating comma delimited file that basically
leaves out a few commas, which caused me to hand edit with a hex editor
all the files to upload to Shopsite, and then later shell out for a copy
of Corel Wordperfect Office so I could have Quattro Pro. Now I work in
Excel, close the document, load it in to Quattro Pro and save it in
comma delimited format, which works. The big problem is that the
process is tedious at best, and frankly I do not like Quattro Pro. It
is slow and causes a lot of memory leaks on my system, for reasons I am
unsure and not willing to invest the time to investigate; it also has
caused errors that require me to reboot my system, and frankly I don't
like to reboot my system, and keep most on in power save for instant
access.

My questions are as follows:

1. Has anyone been using the newest Excel and know if MS has fixed the
problem with exporting to a comma delimited format? I know this is not
a shopsite problem, but perhaps someone else has had luck and provide me
information so I can decide if I should upgrade to the new Office.

2. As an aside to Lauren/Jim, is it possible and not so costly for
Shopsite to support the .xls file format directly for upload/download
instead of just comma delimited? I know that comma delimited is a very
generic format which has a lot of benefits in terms of what kind of db
you can import to and certainly should not be dropped( I use other dbs
for other sites, but all of them will support .xls), but for most of my
products and pages work I find I don't really need to be in a db. A few
of the customers on some of my sites only get information from vendors
in xls format. It would be nice if there was direct .xls support.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Andy Fredrick
MarketPath, Inc.
In beautiful Boise Idaho