General Consultant Discussion

Does anyone have a good contact for a conversion from Lotus 123 with macros to Excel? And please stop laughing.

No question is ever worth laughing at!! What version of Excel? Some of the earlier Excel versions would convert Lotus for you. Unfortunately, when I migrated WIN 8, I stopped installing my Lotus. I might have the old hard drive that it was installed on if you are in dire need.

Oh, we're using Excel now?

What version of Lotus 123? Anything before v5 will only run on XP.

The file extension is .123. The issue is that there are macros involved and while technically they are able to get the spreadsheet ""converted"", the macros do not run. Or if someone just wants to start fresh with them to create an Excel sheet from scratch, that's OK, too. Just not something we have time to work on right now.

It depends on what ""macros"" are installed. Early macro implementations of 123 were merely keystroke recordings and while there was some decent branching and looping logic commands included, I don't recall that we were ever able to get that to convert to Excel. Yegads, that was about 20 or more years ago. :-/ At the time, Excel had an early version of a macro language which was derived off of some early flavor of Visual Basic but before the new VBA that we use today. Somewhere in there, Lotus came out with something similar but by that time, we had already moved everything to Excel. I do remember hours of tearing my hair out, trying to understand how to get Excel to place the cursor at a relative referenced location so that it would function like the old keystroke macros we had in 123 and although I was finally able to get it to work once I found the right commands, it was several more years before I could feel comfortable with it. tl;dr Most likely, you'll have to rewrite the macros, depending on the version of 123 you're using.

OK - so last chance - anyone want this project, or shall I tell the client to search elsewhere?

I may have a guy for this. Checking on availability and desire.

You may want to save to Symphony file first, this should run on Win 7. Then you may be able to convert from that version to a level of Excel. Also, in the Excel version, hope you can find an old one, go to the options area and turn on the lotus 123 compatibilities.