[Ham-Computers] Excel 2007 versus 2003

[Robert Downs via Ham-Computers]

It's End-of-the-year time here again.  Sometime during the past year, I 
installed Office 2007 on our main machine (running XP).  I just discovered that 
Excel 2007 won't save to a dBase 4 or 5 DBF, which for several years was 
how I had been getting around 2003's unfriendly treatment of leading zeros and 
13-digit eBay Item Numbers.  Does anyone know whether (a) there is a patch 
available somewhere to fix this?  Or whether you can reinstall just Excel 
2003 somehow without disturbing the Office 2007 installation?  Our Sales Tax 
report is due in a week.and a half.

And is there in either one of them a way to change the default treatment of 
all-numeric fields from numeric to text.  Which solves both the leading 
zero and the eBay Item Number problem.

For the benefit anyone to whom it might matter but who hasn't yet 
discovered it, sometime between 2003 and 2007, Microsoft rewrote the definition of a 
CSV (Comma Separated Variable) file to eliminate the double-quotes.  Excel 
2007 will still read the file with double quotes around each field but if you 
edit and save it, it strips out the double quotes.  And Yahoo NEO won't 
read the old format file at all.

Robert Downs - Houston
wa5cab dot com (Web Store)
MVPA 9480