Well, I solved it by right clicking on the download link at my credit card
company and doing SAVE TARGET AS. The resulting file looked fine. The
weird thing is that it still didn't look fine if I allowed it to open
directly from the web. So what's going on? Now just a matter of curiosity
since I've solved the immediate problem.

It turns out that I had mis-stated the original problem.

When I opened the file directly from the web site, each row looked like
this: Each line occupies the first cell in a row.

1, "blah blah", "20.45", "1/1/2002" etc. Note there are no quotes around
the first item. I assume that's why Excel couldn't convert it on the fly.

When I did a SAVE AS to txt or csv it looked like this:

"1," "blah blah," "20.45," "1/1/2002," etc Even worse now, the commas
being inside the quotes.

When I finally learned how to do SAVE TARGET AS to get the file without
opening it, then the file was fine. It looked like this via Notepad and was
in good XLS format when opened by Excel.

"1", "blah blah", "20.45", "1/1/2002"

No emergency anymore, but can anyone figure out why the format was good if I
downloaded the file and then opened it, but bad if I opened it directly from
the web site?



"Laurel" wrote in message
...
How can I change a .csv spreadhseet to a regular .xls spreadsheet? I've
tried SAVE AS, choosing .xls as the file type, but that doesn't work.
When I open the new .xls file, it's still in comma delimited format. If
this sounds strange, please see details below.

For years I've been downloading my credit card statement. The choice I
pick is "excel .csv". The file that gets downloaded has a .csv extension,
but when I open it, it is in standard .xls format. That is the items are
in cells, not enclosed in quotes, and not separated by commas. I'm not an
Excel user, typically, so I didn't think anything of it.

Today, however, two things changed.

1 - Instead of downloading to my PC, asking me where I wanted it saved, it
just opened up the spread sheet. I had to explicitly use the Excel SAVE
AS option to get it to store on my PC.

2 - The format was what I would think a csv file should look like, that is
items were enclosed in quotes and separated by commas.

I've inquired of the credit card company (e-mail -waiting for answer), as
it would seem that something had changed, but maybe not. Since I
installed SP 2, who knows what it might be contributing to the situation.

TIA for any advice on any of these issues.