<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; ">Never got into AppleScript. That's not a bad idea, though.<DIV><BR><DIV><DIV>On Oct 23, 2006, at 2:37 PM, jbv wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><P>Ray , </P><P>If you're on Mac, I've you tried some applescript to convert all <BR>your excel files to tab/return test files ? </P><P>JB </P><BLOCKQUOTE type="CITE">Greetings, I'm using "<SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><FONT face="Lucida Grande"><FONT size="+0">open file myPath for binary read" to read an Excel file and I'm getting lots of garbage characters since I believe it's Microsoft's proprietary binary format. If I save the Excel file as a Text (Tab Delimited) file I can read from it fine. The problem is I have about 500 of these file. To manually convert all of them would be extremely time consuming.</FONT></FONT></SPAN><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> <BR></SPAN><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><FONT face="Lucida Grande"><FONT size="+0">Any suggestions on reading an Excel file and filtering out all the garbage characters?</FONT></FONT></SPAN><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"></SPAN></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">_______________________________________________</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">metacard mailing list</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="mailto:metacard@lists.runrev.com">metacard@lists.runrev.com</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard">http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard</A></DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR></DIV></BODY></HTML>