RE: Easiest and most functional way to convert selectedspoolfilesinto Excel

What is the advantage to converting a spooled file to Excel as opposed to
simply converting the data to excel instead?  I guess I am thinking like a
programmer and not a user on this because to me it seems much easier to work
directly with the data as opposed to a pre-existing report which will then
have to be parsed and formatted to fit into Excel. 

Obviously I am missing something here.



-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Cassidy, Alan
Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2006 8:28 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: RE: Easiest and most functional way to convert
selectedspoolfilesinto Excel

CPYTOIMPF does indeed output just one column. There are a couple of vendor
products out there that also promise to convert your spool file into CSV
files but one product I checked out once did the same thing. (I don't think
it was one of the vendors who offered products hereing).

There is "heavy lifting" like Vernon said, is "getting the data out" from
the spool file, because there are your inevitable title lines and column
headings. Then sometimes you get extra little lines in between, variable
numbers of lines per record, and so on. 

But with all that, some new report programs I've had to do were a lot easier
to do by writing code to extract it. A good commercial product could
automate almost all of this I think, and would generally come as part of
another software product, like report distribution, etc. 

--Alan




-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of PaulMmn
Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2006 8:40 AM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Easiest and most functional way to convert selected
spoolfilesinto Excel


Did anyone mention CPYTOIMPF  (check spelling)...  this command will 
copy a flat file to a CSV format file and put it in the IFS folder of 
your choice.  CSV is readable by Excell.  CPYTOIMPF is free; comes 
with OS/400.

--Paul E Musselman
PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx