Creating a table in a text editor

[Ron Cooper]

Is there a way of creating a table with a text editor?

[Stan Mathews]

Re: Creating a table in a text editor

Not clear what that means.

You can create a spreadsheet in excel pre 2007, hilight the active area, and save as .dbf.

[Tom Cone Jr]

Re: Creating a table in a text editor

Also you can write an xbasic script which will create a table when its run.

[Stan Mathews]

Re: Creating a table in a text editor

With either of these suggestions, the table is not part of your database until you manually add it or issue the file_add_to_db() command like

FILE_ADD_TO_DB("c:\Alpha Five\data\customer.dbf")

[Ron Cooper]

Re: Creating a table in a text editor

Thank you Stan, what is the structure?
Thank you Tom, with Stan's assistance I managed to do that.

[Stan Mathews]

Re: Creating a table in a text editor

The table structure will be whatever you create in excel. Alpha will read the dbf and create the necessary empty (at first) support files.
IOW, if you create a spreadsheet with column headings in the form of legal dbf field names. Those will be the field names Alpha sees.
If you make the first row cells each a value of a legal dbf field type, the fields will have the data type of the first row cells.

This means that if column A is headed ------- amount
and A2 holds 01/22/2011
the field type for the amount field will be date. So you need to make sure the data formatting in the first row of cells is the way you want the field data to be typed.

[Ron Cooper]

Re: Creating a table in a text editor

Stan

Sorry to trouble you, but can you give me a small example. I have tried saving the file from Excel in various formats, but when I add the table to the DB it declares the error -
"Table is encrypted using a different key"

[Ted Giles]

Re: Creating a table in a text editor

Ron, look at this thread and the embrionic Data Dictionery in one of my posts.
http://msgboard.alphasoftware.com/al...rty-Management

[Stan Mathews]

Re: Creating a table in a text editor

Try this.

forconvert.zip

Unzip the file.
Open it in excel.
Hilight the cells with data.
File menu, Save As.
navigate to where you want the table.
in the File Name box enter the name you want
in the Save as Type choose DBF 4.
Save button.
Ok
Yes
File menu, Close.
No to save changes.

[Ron Cooper]

Re: Creating a table in a text editor

DBF 4 is not an option. I have Excel 2010

[Stan Mathews]

Re: Creating a table in a text editor

See post #2

You can create a spreadsheet in excel pre 2007,

[Ron Cooper]

Re: Creating a table in a text editor

Thank you. I have an old machine with Excel 2007 and it worked great.