Journey - Just beginning!

Over the last 2 years, quite a few people commented on the impressive qualities of the SaveDBF Excel add-in and its reliability.

I did a quick summary of my ever-growing customer list and I was surprised at the variety of industries and geographical diversity of the people who are using my software. The SaveDBF Excel add-in is used on every continent and over 80 countries.

My esteemed customer list includes researchers studying glaciers in Antarctica, students and professors from literally all universities in Europe and North America, Fortune 500 companies with multi-billion dollars of revenue and many government agencies in the US. I have non-profit organizations such as the Nature Conservancy Group, small business owners in South America, organizations supporting mine-recovery efforts in Afghanistan, some of the largest utility and forestry companies in the world, l and the list goes on...

If you are interested in the software and would like to evaluate it for your company or if you have a project in mind, please email me. 100% satisfaction guaranteed!

I have yet to find an Excel problem that I could not solve. Challenge me...:-)

SaveDBF Excel addin - New Version is Now Available!

In addition to bug fixes, here are the highlights of the new added features:

• Tested with the latest Excel 2010 on Windows XP/Vista and Win 7 (also with Excel 2007).
• Replaced the Microsoft database driver with my own that creates native binary DBF files. MS is slowly phasing out the DBF capabilities in its driver and this step had to be made sooner or later. No relying on MS database features anymore!
• Added the option to over-write the original DBF file (a backup is created).
• Added the option to auto-fix column names in an Excel file (this is limited to removing leading and trailing spaces automatically and replacing illegal characters with an underscore).
• Added the option to convert an Excel file to ALL TEXT fields based on the width of the columns. This is a great feature for labeling programs.
• There are no longer any issues with dashes/spaces etc in the file name or worksheet tab name! Any names are allowed.
• Excel files that contain error values are now converted and the error values are automatically replaced with a blank.
• Hidden columns are identified.
• Even more improved error handling and many more!

Many tireless weekends of development and testing went into this version so I hope you will like it!

Thank you for your patience!

SaveDBF Excel Add-in future plans

Dear Fellow DBF Users,

The latest upgrade of the SaveDBF Excel 2007 add-in (used to be called XLSX2DBF) can be now downloaded from HERE!.

The changes include fixes related to minor bugs in Microsoft's OLEDB engine and some improved field type identification for users who start out with an Excel file.

Future plans:

I plan one more upgrade in Jan/Feb 2010. This will be a major upgrade with lots of planned improvements as listed below:

- Add a Preference window where users can set to:

• Overwrite the original DBF file (and create a date-stamped backup file in the same folder).

• Mimic Microsoft's Excel 2003 behaviour (i.e. automatically replace spaces in field names with an underscore, accept field names longer than 10 characters)
  

- Add a Data Conversion window where the user can change the field type and size from what the add-in determined from the data. This is useful for people who start with an Excel file with data that do not necessarily reflect the maximum field size for a character field, for example. The add-in will guess the maximum size from the data, but the user can over-ride it in the new window. Or you can simply click OK and the add-in will behave exactly as it does now.

- Batch processing capabilities (i.e. calling the macro from a third party program (e.g. Python or Perl or C++ etc) and mass-process many files without user interaction.

- Improved speed for very large DBF files and a progress bar with % complete reported.

If you have other improvement ideas this is the time to email them to me at gygulyas - at - yahoo - dot - ca!

Thank you very much for your continued support!

Long live the DBF!