We have tried exporting from FileMaker (V5) to Excel in several different formats (tab separated, dbf, dif, sylk and merge) and in all formats the information you get when you open in excel has a box everywhere there was a return used in the sending field from filemaker???

Please does anyone have any suggestions???

Thank you in advance for your help

You obviously use carriage returns in your felds ( bad move for compatibility)

Filemaker translates every return character (ASCI code 13) into ASCI character 11. I don't know why on Earth FMPinc chose to do this, maybe this has something to do with the MAC origins.

ASCI 11 does not have a symbol ( at least in windows) . (The FMP help file calls it a vertical tab, whatever that is) When this gets exported to Excel, then all you see is a box. You could emulate this with two cells in Excel. Put 11 in cell A1, then in A2 type =Char(A1) and you'll see a box.

In fact the first 32 characters in ASCII do not have a symbol.

I'm not sure what you could do apart from creating calculated fields to split the lines in your text fields, before exporting.

Hope this helps

Excel uses CHAR(10) for a return inside a Cell. Maybe you could get excel to replace the Char 11 with 10?