I am trying to save some files for a woman who's husband just died and left
all his business inventory in an old format.

The files where created in an old DOS database program called PowerBase. I
can export the files as several different formats and open them in Windows
3.1 (on the same machine). I then export them to TAB delimited txt files.

The problem is when I transfer them to a "new" machine (windows XPPro) I
can't open them in excel. I believe the problem is with the txt encoding
type used by Works 3.0 in windows 3.1. If I open them in notepad on the
XPPro machine, it appears to not read them properly either.

Can anyone make a suggestion?

Thanks.