select all you cells and set the font as courier new (a mono spaced font).
the autofit your columns or manually adjust the width.

Then do file=Save as and select Formatted Text (space delimited) (.prn)

to be more exact, you might go to a second sheet and put in formula in A1
like

=Sheet1!A1 & rept(" ",20-len(Sheet1!A1))



then dragfill down and across to capture your data.

Adjust the formula if you want to left pad the value.

then select all the cells and do Edit=copy, then Edit=Paste Special and
select values. This replaces the formulas.

then you can copy the sheet to a new workbook and save as above after
autofitting the columns.

An alternative is to use low level file io to write out the file a cell at a
time/a line at a time using space padding as above. Unix uses vblf as a
line terminator I believe, while windows uses vbcrlf. I assume Unix will be
able to handle the file, but if not, you will have to use code to terminate
with vblf.

--
Regards,
Tom Ogilvy

"jeffP" wrote in message
...
Hi all,
I've got a project that takes a *dbf file into Excel, does some clean up
etc, then I need to save it as a fixed length text file that's able to be
imported into a Unix system. I've got most of it done but now I can't get
it
exported or saved into a fixed field length text file.I've worked w/ comma
delimited files but this has me lost.
I have 8 columns that need to be set w/ fixed character lengths even
though
they hold varying length data. Then I need to export/save the sheet as a
text file for the Unix people.
As I mentioned , I'm really lost / stuck and any help is , as always,
greatly appreciated.

--
jeff