I'm getting the impression I'm not the only one who can deal with numbers better when they're on a spreadsheet.

I'm also getting the impression there are probably still a lot of people who don't know the relatively simple, easy process for converting Word, text, and LP history files to Excel.  I hammered out this method, myself, out of hunger.  It might not be the easiest, nor the best, but I'm comp challenged, so I came up with this method by trial and error.

Frankly, I think it's a shame the numbers don't come down in a form that allows them to be cut and pasted directly, but they don't.

If you don't know how to do it and feel the same frustrations I've felt, here's my stumbling method:

Step 1)  Bring up Notepad, Word, and Excel.

Step 2)  Select all the numbers you want to get onto the spreadsheet from the source.  Click COPY.  Go to Notepad and click PASTE.  At that point you can kill the source screen. 

Step 3)  Click SELECT ALL on the text on notepad you want to convert, click to WORD, paste.

Step 4)  On Word, click edit, then REPLACE on the pulldown menu

Step 5)  You need TABs, not hyphens between the numbers to get them on EXCEL.  Type a hyphen into the space labelled FIND.  Then go to the bottom of the box labelled MORE and click.  You'll see a pulldown labelled, SPECIAL.  Go back up and click the space labelled REPLACE, then click SPECIAL.  The second item on the pulldown menu is TAB CHARACTER.  Click it.

Step 6)  Now you should see a hyphen in the FIND space, and an upside-down V followed by a T.  Click REPLACE ALL.

Step 7)  This will replace all the hyphens with Tabs.  Now, if that's all you need to replace, select all, copy, and paste it all back into the notepad.  Now select all again and copy it to EXCEL.

Done deal.  The same process works for all manner of things you find in the text that screw up putting it into EXCEL.  Replace the Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, etc text with a an empy replace box.  Replace 2005 with 2005^t. 

It's cumbersome, but at least it gets it onto Excel where you can work with it.

Jack