theroo@ecsvax.UUCP (Bron D. Skinner) (05/26/87)
I have recently been trying to transfer information between a Mac
and PC environment and have run into some problems that I wonder
if anyone can help with. First, the software: Red Ryder for the
Mac and Crosstalk XVI for the PC to do communications.
The tasks: Move a document created in MacWrite to a PC to be
formatted in WordPerfect.
Move a Lotus 123 (V. 2.0) *.wk1 file from a PC to
a Mac Excel file.
The problems:
1. A text file created from MacWrite and uploaded to a minicomputer
file appears without carriage returns or line feeds. The only
way I could get the file up with the appropriate line feeds &
carriage returns was to send it a line at a time (w/ ASCII Send
routine in Red Ryder) to an Ed file (on a VAX). There has to
a better way. Both Xmodem and Kermit transfer protocols are
available, but produce one long string when brought to the PC.
2. A Lotus 3 file created with the PC using v. 2.0 could be trans-
mitted to the VAX with Xmodem and down to the Mac (though Red
Ryder did some weird stuff with the number of bytes it said were
going to be transmitted). However, Excel apparently would not
read the .wk1 file and we had to use a .prn file instead. This
created a lot of extra work once the file was loaded into Excel
to re-arrange the columns into separate cells since each .prn
file line was loaded as one long string.
Now, I know that there are easy ways to move files between PC's and
Macs with special software and so forth. I suspect that my problems
would appear anyway. Has anyone got any ideas about how to address
these issues? Does Excel *really* only read .wks files? If so, what
do people with v. 2.0 and higher do for easier transfer?
Thanks in advance for any ideas.
Bron Skinner
Information Systems Coordinator
Department of Family Medicine
Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
(theroo@ecsvax.UUCP)