Will Excel be able to handle our Lotus 123 spreadsheets?
	How do I import Lotus 123 .wk4 files into Excel 5?
	When I convert my old Lotus 123 files into Excel files they grow enormously in size. What can I do about this?

Our company is converting from Lotus 123 to Excel. We have many spreadsheets with large macros in them. Will Excel be able to handle these?
Keywords: Lotus, Conversion
Posted December 17, 1996

Unless they are of the most basic variety, and by that I mean they utilize only macro commands that were available in Lotus 2.1 or earlier, Excel will not be able to handle them at all. Any complex macros will have to be reprogrammed in Excel's macro language.

How do I import Lotus 123 .wk4 files into Excel 5?
Keywords: Convert Lotus 123 Files
Posted November 7, 1996

Microsoft provides a free filter for importing Lotus 123 .wk4 files. You can download this filter from the Software Library on the Microsoft web site at http://www.microsoft.com/kb/softlib/

When I convert my old Lotus 123 files into Excel files they grow enormously in size. What can I do about this?
Keywords: Convert Lotus 123 Files
Posted November 7, 1996

This happens because in Lotus, formatting was at one time applied to a row or column in this file by selecting the entire row or column and applying the format, rather than just selecting the specific range. Once this has occured, and you attempt to convert the file from Lotus to Excel, the extra formatting fools Excel into thinking that the entire Lotus worksheet is occupied with data. You can verify this by pressing CTRL END on the keyboard. This will bring you to the last cell that Excel believes is occupied, which you'll probably find is far beyond the actual data area.

The solution is to delete all the empty rows and columns from the end of the actual data to the point where Excel thinks the data ends. You have to do this by clicking and dragging in the row and column header areas and choosing Edit - Delete, not by selecting the cells in the worksheet and deleting their contents. Once you've deleted all the rows and columns, save the workbook, close it and reopen it. This should give you a significant size reduction.

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Dain bramaged.