Excel (with Lotus ancestors)

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I have two Excel spreadsheets that I need to combine (as separate worksheets in the the same workbook). I thought it was a simple ‘move or copy worksheet’ deal – until I tried it. The formatting went goofy and even the row and column headers look strange. I suspected corruption, but I finally remembered that one of the files started life – way back- as a Lotus spreadsheet and has migrated through Office 95, 97, and finally, 2000. The other was created in Excel 2000.
I really need good formatting – it’s a catalog. And I’m not crazy enough to re-enter all this data.
Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

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Hi,
Have you tried inserting a new blank worksheet into the workbook originally created in Excel2000 and then copy and pasting all the data from the other worbook onto the new blank sheet?
Just a thought.

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I don’t know if turning on the Lotus transition would help. This is under Tools/Options/Transition. Good luck. I remember when we (at work) upgraded to Excel from Lotus and what happened to our spreadsheets. It was a mess.

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I have tried pasting to a new worksheet. It still blows the column formatting (critical). In a wierd way, too. Columns 5 wide end up as 6.71 wide, etc. In fact I’ve tried every combination I can think of – moving #1 to #2, #2 to #1, #1 & #2 to a NEW workbook—you get the idea. I’ve also tried the paste-special. Same deal.
The transition idea was interesting. I get the idea that it just sets a default format for saving, though. I couldn’t figure out a good way to use it.
Thanks for all the good ideas, though.

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The transition purpose is to allow you to use the same keystrokes that you would have used in Lotus and have Excel recognize them. I still don’t know if it will help though.

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Excel imports Lotus DOS spreadsheets with weird style formatting. One thing I found when migrating (it’s been a while) is to reset the Style for the entire imported spreadsheet to one of your desired Excel defaults. This won’t help you with column widths and row heights, but those are easy to fix.

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