Hello all...

I have a dilemma I cannot seem to figure out. It seems to be fairly
complicated from my end. If anyone can help out I would be extremely
appreciative.

What I have is a ".dat" file that is comma delimited. It contains
information about a production run's defects. There are several fields and
an enormous amount of data to work through. I have spent some time to
interpret what the layout is on this file, but I need some help on some
mathematics and possibly some algorithms to generate some type of
interpretable chart.

Each row of data begins with a single character to identify what that row of
information is for. The defect rows all start with a "d" in the 1st position
(column). From there, the next piece of information I need is in the 4th
position (column) which contains the defect type (as a number). The third
piece of information I need is in the 14th position (column) which contains
the defect position in length (mm). The last piece of information I need is
located in the 35th position (column) which contains the channel position of
the defect (1 to 48).

With the above stated... I would like to evaluate the data as it is coming
into Excel by channel and the length position (converted to meters). With
this data, I would like to have some method to grade something like this:
if there are more than 100 defects within 100 meters then grade it as a NO
GOOD section.

Any help on this issue is greatly appreciated. Please let me know if any
more detail is needed.

TIA,

Mark Ivey