944,006 Members | Top Members by Rank

Ad:
Mar 31st, 2008
0

Need help in converting multiple text files into excel worksheets in a workbook

Expand Post »
Hi,

I have multiple text files (.txt) which is a table like input:-

Column1 Column2 Column3 Column4
1 5 10 15
5 10 20 40
..........

This is just one of the .txt files and I want to insert these txt files into separate worksheets in excel workbook. Any idea how to use bash script to automate this as i have thousands of these text files to transferred to. Please help! Been trying to do it for weeks yet cant find any solution.

Thanks alot.
Reputation Points: 10
Solved Threads: 1
Newbie Poster
ahjiefreak is offline Offline
11 posts
since Dec 2007
Mar 31st, 2008
0

Re: Need help in converting multiple text files into excel worksheets in a workbook

Hey There,

If you have the .txt files, just process the data (unless it's already set up this way, in which case you're halfway done) so that the columns are delimited by a pipe or tab (the two delimiters Excel will process automatically).

Then just redirect that output into a file called: Whatever.xls

and open it with Excel and you should be all set. The columns may look ugly, but everything fits in it's right place. There's a simple trick involving selecting all the columns in an Excel spreadsheet that will cause them to all expand to the length of the greatest field, but I don't recall that one offhand.

So, if you had these separated by an unknown number of spaces, just do:

sed 's/ */|/' yourfile.txt >yourfile.xls

The sed command may interpret the space differently, so may have to modify the command. I have one machine where / */ splits words (like h|e|y) and I have to use + and another where it won't. Or you could use awk, or whatever works best for you.

Good luck

, Mike
Reputation Points: 102
Solved Threads: 47
Posting Whiz
eggi is offline Offline
399 posts
since Oct 2007
Apr 1st, 2008
0

Re: Need help in converting multiple text files into excel worksheets in a workbook

Hi there,

I have hundreds of files to process in this case and the thing is i would like to combine a bunch of text files into different worksheet for a similar workbook.

Means workbook A contain spreadsheet A1, A2, A3...etc.

Pls advise. Thanks.
Click to Expand / Collapse  Quote originally posted by eggi ...
Hey There,

If you have the .txt files, just process the data (unless it's already set up this way, in which case you're halfway done) so that the columns are delimited by a pipe or tab (the two delimiters Excel will process automatically).

Then just redirect that output into a file called: Whatever.xls

and open it with Excel and you should be all set. The columns may look ugly, but everything fits in it's right place. There's a simple trick involving selecting all the columns in an Excel spreadsheet that will cause them to all expand to the length of the greatest field, but I don't recall that one offhand.

So, if you had these separated by an unknown number of spaces, just do:

sed 's/ */|/' yourfile.txt >yourfile.xls

The sed command may interpret the space differently, so may have to modify the command. I have one machine where / */ splits words (like h|e|y) and I have to use + and another where it won't. Or you could use awk, or whatever works best for you.

Good luck

, Mike
Reputation Points: 10
Solved Threads: 1
Newbie Poster
ahjiefreak is offline Offline
11 posts
since Dec 2007
Apr 1st, 2008
0

Re: Need help in converting multiple text files into excel worksheets in a workbook

Hey,

I found this online. Looks like someone's done lots of work on this already. No sense in repeating it It looks like it takes care of everything you need:

http://search.cpan.org/src/JMCNAMARA...1/doc/tpj.html

Let me know how that works out for ya

, Mike
Reputation Points: 102
Solved Threads: 47
Posting Whiz
eggi is offline Offline
399 posts
since Oct 2007

This thread is more than three months old

No one has posted to this discussion for at least three months. Please let old threads die and do not reply to them unless you feel you have something new and valuable to contribute that absolutely must be added to make the discussion complete. Otherwise, please start a new thread in this forum instead.
Message:
Previous Thread in Shell Scripting Forum Timeline: Issues emailing data from unix/sql script
Next Thread in Shell Scripting Forum Timeline: parsing data from the log file





About Us | Contact Us | Advertise | Acceptable Use Policy
Forum Index | Build Custom RSS Feed


Follow us on Twitter


© 2011 DaniWeb® LLC