Dear Fellow DBF Users,

The latest upgrade of the SaveDBF Excel 2007 add-in (used to be called XLSX2DBF) can be tried at thexlwiz.*************.

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 - a t - yahoo - dot - ca!

Thank you very much for your continued support!

Long live the DBF!

Gyula