I have the dubious honor of parsing 16 or so text files of 33.5kb each into an Excel based rollup. Each text file is generated by a somewhat antiquated cash register system and a data map is necessary to read the contents of the file. Each line of the text file begins with a category related number, i.e., 10, 20, 30, etc. Within the lines of the file the data map points to certain sets of characters relating to various register functions and information, for example, on line 3, characters 8-14 is the store number, characters 15 – 21 is the system time open, characters 22 -36 is the software revision number, etc.
With the exception of the first two characters of each line which relate to a general category, there seems to be no vertical method of separating the contents of the file, i.e., to separate the lines after character two works all the way down, but to separate the text file line again after the 7th character on line three results in erroneous separation at line 46.
My questions are 1) should I use the fso.opentextfile method to scroll through all text files and read certain lines, write the lines to a cell and then “pick out” certain sections of the resulting cell contents or 2) should I import the entire text file and then use specific cell string references to pick data from cells or 3) import only certain rows of each text file as independent queries and use the lookup functions to return the data?
