[geeks] Microsoft Excel

[Chad McAuley]

On 8/10/07, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote:
> For various reasons, I need to use a non-printable character as a
> delimiter in a text file.  I thought ASCII fs (0x1c) would probably be a
> good choice.  It works fine in my scripts and it's easy to generate in
> Servlets.
>
> The problem is that I can't convince fucking Microsoft Excel to import
> files delimited with fs.  I can't seem to even figure out how to get an
> fs character into the clipboard so that I can try pasting it in the
> dialog box.
>
> I'd like to avoid having to run a tr command before every time someone
> wants to open the file in Excel.  Any ideas?
>
> Peace...  Sridhar
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I know with the upper (> 0x7e) ASCII characters you can type them in
by holding down ALT and then typing the decimal value in using the
numberpad.  I haven't tried it with the lower ASCII characters though,
so I'm not sure if the same trick works with them.  My XP SP2 laptop
doesn't complain when I try and enter in the fs character into
notepad, but since it's non-printable I obviously don't have any way
of knowing if the right character is being sent.