If I had to do this, I would convert the data to plain old ASCII on the
mainframe. It would make life a lot simpler on the pc side.

And since the work has to be done somewhere, why not do it where it's easier --
on the mainframe.

JEB wrote:

I have a 2046 byte record that I download from the mainframe to a ".txt"
file. The low order 1500 bytes of this file is purely text data. The first
746 bytes, however, contain a mixture of text, binary and packed data files
(Comp and Comp-3) fields. It appears that irregardless of the contents of
these files, the record length is shortened by the compression of this data
in the download process. Is there any way that I can download this file,
compensating for the loss of the compressed fields (don't need them anyway),
so I can parse and load the true text fields into an Excel Spreadsheet?

Thanking you all in advance...
--
John

--

Dave Peterson