Fixed Length

[B-Man]

I have a address solution that we are going to send to our customers. They will type in there name and address of their customers that they want books mailed to, and then export that data and send it to us. Up until today I thought we would import it back into a FM Database and print labels. They now want to be able to import this to our AS/400 and it only likes fixed length (so I'm told). Is there any way that I can export from FileMaker as fixed length or is there a conversion program that I can run after the data is sent to me to convert it from tab seperated to fixed length.

Thanks,

Brian

[Vaughan]

Just a guess here, and I assume that the unused characters in the string are spaces... let's say that the length is 20 characters, the calculation would be

Left(address & "20 spaces", 20)

where "20 spaces" is 20 spaces between quotes.

[B-Man]

Vaughan,

Thanks for the reply. I came up with something like that after I posted. I am going to do that for every field and then merge all of those fields as one master field and then export that one field. What a pain. Thanks again for your help.

Brian

[Rigsby]

A quick reply – quick solution – not very elegant ……… but it works:

Use the copy records script to get all of the files you want into the clipboard (Windows) and then past them into Microsoft Excel – In MS-Excel you can give everything a fixed length or each field. This also has the advantage, that you can open an Excel file in Filemaker at a later date.

Rigsby