Re. Translating tables among Wordpros

[Geoff Hart <geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

     In my experience, tables created using the "table" function of any
     wordpro or dtp rarely transfer successfully to another program. There
     are two possible solutions and one definite solution:

     1. Possible: Try using a third-party translator such as Word for Word
     or MacLink Plus (there's another good translation package whose name
     escapes me). These translators often work better than the built-in
     filters in Word and WordPerfect.

     2. Possible: Print the file to disk (don't _save it_ in ASCII format,
     which generally turns the tables into extensive lists of unrelated row
     and column entries, one datum per line). For some (not all) software,
     printing to disk preserves the row and column locations just as you'd
     expect when printing to a printer, and the data in the resulting
     output file are separated by spaces (or occasionally tabs).

     3. Probable: If you expect to exchange many tables, convert the tables
     into "tab delimited" format in the original file. Some software lets
     you extract the data from the table in a single step using a menu
     command, and replaces the table with rows separated by carriage
     returns and columns separated by tabs. For new tables, you're better
     off to just type the tables using tabs in the first place. (I find
     this to be much faster when working in PageMaker and WordPerfect than
     using third-party table tools. If you need to know my trick, drop me a
     line privately and I'll spill the beans; if there's sufficient
     interest, I'll post to the entire list.)

     Hope this helps!

     --Geoff Hart    #8^{)}
     geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

     Disclaimer: If I didn't commit it in print in one of
     our reports, it don't represent FERIC's opinion.