Captain Excel

By Chris Wood, CPA

I was in Florida for a week and had a wonderful time. If you’ve been keeping up with my blog you know I live to travel. So, I’m already planning my next trip. It’s on to my ancestral home, Ireland.

One of the more frequent requests I get is how to convert a text file into viable Excel data that can be pivoted? There are a wide variety of text files. I call them textual variants, and there are different methods used to refine the file depending on the variant. The first example is a common one. This is an accounts receivable aging file. The basic problem here is that a header line appears first which identifies the customer name. All of the other pertinent information (date, invoice number, amount, etc.) is contained in subsequent lines.

I don’t purport to hide my political leanings. I think that it is apparent if you read through my prior blogs, but this blog will clearly leave no doubt. I recently read a politically based blog that I just flat out disagreed with. That’s not unusual. What is unusual is that this blog was not found in any of the usual wingnut locations such as Townhall, Power Line Blog, Real Clear Politics, etc. It was found right here on Accounting Web.

By Chris Wood, CPA

I have an issue with the number formatting in a pivot table.