Subject Re: Import/Export not all excel data can be imported From Mervyn Bick <invalid@invalid.invalid> Date Wed, 15 Mar 2023 09:05:54 +0200 Newsgroups dbase.getting-started On 2023/03/15 01:12, James Lavery wrote: > Hello Dirk, > Found enclosed below note (from Nov 2022) regarding Excel import/export. > > Info helpful to me: "append from array" > > My question: How do I identify to dBase5 that the Excel spreadsheet is an Array?? > > The spreadsheet contains only letters and numbers. > > Developer Desktop does not recognize .xlsx files. > > What must I do to spredsheet/data for it to be recognized by dBase5 as an array. > > Help is greatly appreciated. > > James As you are using a DOS version of dBASE the only way to import data from Excel (whether .xls or .xlsx files) is first to open the file in Excel and export the data to a .csv file. You can look at the contents of the .csv file using the source code editor. MODIfy COMMand whatever.csv  (Only the first 4 letters of any command are actually required.) You will need to create a .dbf file in dBASE with the correct fields. To import the data use whatever  // whatever.dbf but you don't need to include the .dbf append from whatever.csv delimited use Unfortunately there are some limitations which, depending on the actual data, may or may not be a problem. APPEND ... DELIMITED will not import data into a Memo field.  If you have data longer than 254 characters it won't fit into a character field so this will mean writing a program to import the data.  Dead simple with objects, a real PITA in DOS. APPEND ... DELIMITED will only recognise dates in the .csv file if they are presented as ...,yyyymmdd,.... i.e no spaces, delimiters or separators.  Unfortunately Excel does not, as far as I'm aware, export dates to a .csv file in this format. This means you need to create the .dbf table with a character field to wide enough accept the date value as it is saved in the .csv file.  After the data has been imported you need to add a date field and write a little program to populate the date field from the contents of the character field.  The character field can then be removed from the table. I see you are accessing the newsgroups using Web-News via the link on the dBASE website.  The news groups are also available as an NNTP feed from news.dbase.com which is far more convenient.  Not all email programs handle NNTP so if yours doesn't I suggest you download Thunderbird. Mervyn.