[NTLK] Exporting NewtonWorks Spreadsheets

From: Don V. Zahniser (irntooth_at_eznet.net)
Date: Sun Apr 10 2005 - 05:40:27 PDT


Hi, All -

I was recently looking to move a small Newton Works spreadsheet to my
PB1400. I don't use Excel on my Mac, so QFExchange was not an option.
 The solution I came up with:

1) Email the spreadsheet from the Newton - I used SimpleMail.

2) Download the mail message to the computer. In my case, this produced a
tab-delimited text file, with the formulas present as text instead of the
data. One problem: The process puts a tab character in front of every line.

3) Copy/paste the text into a word processor, and use find/replace to
strip off the leading tab. (Use the appropriate 'code' to find CR+Tab and
replace with CR).

4) Copy/paste the text into the spreadsheet application, being careful to
make sure that the upper left of the text is pasted into the correct
relative cell of the spreadsheet. Otherwise, the cell references won't
agree, and you'll get errors.

The result: A spreadsheet on the computer that performs the same
calculations as on the Newton.

Some thoughts, observations, and comments:

 - I did this both with my Mac and AppleWorks 6, and with a Dell and
Windows XP and Microsoft Office. Same process worked for both. It
didn't occur to me until just now, but doing an alt-select in Word would
be faster. This lets you select a rectangular block of text from within
a document.

 - Your mail client must not convert tabs to spaces. It worked
transparently with PowerMail on my Mac, but not from the Webmail
application that I used to access the message from the Dell (However,
when I chose to download the file with the Webmail application, all was
well). I suppose you could find/replace the spaces back to tabs, though.

 - There are potential problems with mail applications or servers
wrapping the lines on the mail message, so large spreadsheets may be
non-trivial to export.

 - I did this with a spreadsheet with simple functions only. If a
function is named differently in Works than on the PC, you may have to
substitute before pasting it into the spreadsheet applicaton.

 - It takes less time to do than to explain.

:^)

-- 
Don V. Zahniser
<irntooth_at_eznet.net>
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