Hi,
A bit of background on my dilemma from my previous post in comp.programming
below:
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"Im hoping someone on here can help with the following as I am fishing for
ideas and help.
Let me give you a bit of background first; At work we have an in house
software program designed for sizing pipe systems. This produces a parts
list which can then be printed. You might have 5 of these to make one 'job'.
Due to over-ordering of materials recently, we now have to open each parts
list for the job and put the quantities into an excel spreadsheet which
gives us an overall material list for that job. This is okay on smaller jobs
of 2 - 3 systems, but larger 30 - 40 systems can take days of reading parts
lists and typing the quants into an excel spreadsheet.

Thats the background, heres the hard bit. The program we use for sizing pipe
is incompatible with any other program, you can print / view data to your
hearts content but we are not allowed to get #inside# the program.
I need to create / copy / download / beg / borrow a program which can read
the parts list and paste it into corresponding cells in the excel
spreadsheet.
We can print it in pdf form if that is of any use. Does anyone have any
ideas?
Im fairly computer literate but not so much in programming. Let me know if I
can supply any further information, im willing to work at this until I find
a solution.
Thanks for your help,
Lee"

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I have managed to get the data off the pdf file into a text file, then into
excel, what I dont know is how to tell excel to put certain data in certain
locations before the data hits the sheet. Im told this is called parsing?
Can anyone advise / point me in the direction of tutorials so I can read
further into this and eventually give it a go.
thanks
Lee