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PowerForce 
Introduction
This document is a quick guide on importing text data into Excel. One
use of this is when you want to import the output of a PowerForce Report Builder printout, and then carry out more data manipulation in Excel. |
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Overview
In the original version of Powerforce, there were limited options of how to export data. You
would generally export your PowerForce report into a “.txt” file (this document relates to that scenario). Under the more recent versions of Powerforce you may save you data to a .html (yes, web format) file, and import it directly into Excel.
Section
Open a new Worksheet in your Excel
application.
Select Data / Import External Data / Import
Data
When you’re prompted with the name of the
file to import, select the previously created file name (out of Report Writer).
In this instance the file name is
“c:\temp\excel.txt”.
Press Open to load the file in.
You will be presented with the follow Text
Import Wizard, which will lead you through defining the columns as you’d like
them to be imported (& aligned) in Excel. Note: You are doing this step
because the file created in this instance is not a “csv” (comma separated)
file, and hence Excel can make a best guess as to where the columns should
align, but computers do make mistakes.
Press “Next”
Paying close attention to a couple of
things here:
Excel has looked through the file and taken
a guess as to where columns may be aligned and it has thrown up these various
vertical lines.
We know better, so we’re going to:
- Take the first line by selecting its head (red box around its
arrow), and moving it along till it meets the line at ‘10’ – this will
collapse the first line.
- Take the line at column 12 or so, and also move it onto column 10.
- Take the line at 25 and collapse it back onto column 20.
This looks like a wide report, so we can
slide the “slider” along to see the rest of the report and repeat this sequence
above.
All done – press “Next”, which leads
us to the following screen:
This is all a bit too wild for me, so I
tend to “Finish” here.
Press OK
That’s it, all done. If for some reason you
see that you haven’t done that good a job, repeat the process into new Excel
worksheet.
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See Also
 PowerForce Controls
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