Conversion Options: Converting to/from a Fixed Width Text File

NOTE: These options only apply to the 'Convert XLS' conversion method. If you are using the 'MS Excel' conversion method see Conversion of Fixed Width Text Files section for more information.

Here you can specify how 'Convert XLS' will convert to/from fixed width text files.

You have 3 choices for how the output file will be produced. The first two choices, 1 and 2 are specifically meant for converting from a Excel file to a TXT file. Choice 3 can be used for converting to and from a fixed width text file. All of these choices are available by pressing F2 or the clicking on the Options button then selecting the Converting to/from a fixed width text file tab.

1) Retain column width as seen within MS Excel will produce a text file with the same spacing as seen when you open that file within MS Excel. With this option you risk losing data that is truncated due to insufficient column size.

2) Autosize column width to retain all data allows you to optionally have the columns of the Excel file 'auto-sized/auto-formatted' to the appropriate width, so that when converting to a text file, all the data will be retained.

3) Specify column sizes, pad characters and alignments is the most powerful of the 3 choices! With this option you can specify:

A) Exactly how many characters each column will have (width)

B) What pad character to use. When there is empty space (the data is smaller than the width specfied) this character will be used. Most often the Space character is used.

C) Alignment. If padding was required, you can choose to align the data to the left or right of the pad characters.

D) Remove specific columns. If you don't want some of the columns, no problem!

E) Move the position of the columns. That's right, you can re-order the columns to anything you want.

You can convert from XLS, XLSX, XLSM and CSV to a fixed width text file. You can also convert from a fixed width text file to XLS, XLSX, CSV, XML, or HTML. Even converting from a fixed width text file to a fixed width text file is possible (you may want to extract a 'range' or change to/from Unicode in this case).

A special Fixed Width Text Profile Editor has been provided to make this very easy to use (press F3 to display it).

Additional options you should know about

In addition to specifying the width, pad character, alignment etc. for each column you should be aware of several other options. For example, if you are converting from an Excel file you may want to specify which sheets to convert, whether or not to create a new file for each of the sheets specified. Whether or not the input file is an Excel, you could specify a range to use. A range could be something like "A1:B10" or "D:D" to only use the fourth column for example. All of these items are available by going clicking the Options button then selecting the Excel tab.