Importing LabView files

[Saeed Payvar]

Hi All,
Could any of you please tell me how I could open a LabView .dat file
in Excell, or any of other database programs such as Access, or in any
of Mathlab, Maple, SAS, R, SPSS.
What I have is a data acquisition card that transfers data from a
bunch of 7 sensors to a laptop, and a LabView engine that gives a .log
file and a .dat file. I do not have LabView installed on my machine,
and don't know what the structure of the data in the LabView .dat file
looks like. I do have all the others, Excell, Access, Maple, Mathlab,
SAS, and I know how to trasfer between these.
How can I get these to read the data?

Thanks,
SP.

[mikeporter]

It all depends on the structure of the .dat file. If the data is simply tab-delimited text, importing it into any of the environments you specified should be a snap.

One thing you can try is make a copy of a .dat file and change it's extension to .xls. This tells Windows that it's an Excel file. Now try opening the file by double clicking it. If the file is tab-delimited text, you get a dialog box from excel for importing the data and it will open with the data in conventional rows and columns.

Alternately, you can change the copy's extension to .txt and try opening it in Notepad. If you get reasonable looking data, it's text data of some form. Note that in addition to using tabs to delimit data values, other common text formats are comma-delimited and fix
ed-length fields.

If either of these tests fail, the file have some other format and you'll have to get with whoever developed to LV code originally to see how they formatted the data.

If you post one of your .dat files I would be glad to look at it for you.

Mike...

[Saeed Payvar]

Thanks for your detailed reply. It is none of csv, txt or tab delimited.
I've tried all those.
I would appreciate it if you could look at it, yet I tried two times to
upload the files to the newsgroup, size=256kb, and all failed. Am I doing
something wrong here? Otherwise, how I could send it you directly?
Thanks again,
Saeed.


"mikeporter" wrote in message
news:50650000000500000010D30000-1042324653000@exchange.ni.com...
> It all depends on the structure of the .dat file. If the data is
> simply tab-delimited text, importing it into any of the environments
> you specified should be a snap.
>
> One thing you can try is make a copy of a .dat file and change it's
> extension to .xls. This tells Windows that it's an Excel file. Now try
> openi
ng the file by double clicking it. If the file is tab-delimited
> text, you get a dialog box from excel for importing the data and it
> will open with the data in conventional rows and columns.
>
> Alternately, you can change the copy's extension to .txt and try
> opening it in Notepad. If you get reasonable looking data, it's text
> data of some form. Note that in addition to using tabs to delimit data
> values, other common text formats are comma-delimited and fixed-length
> fields.
>
> If either of these tests fail, the file have some other format and
> you'll have to get with whoever developed to LV code originally to see
> how they formatted the data.
>
> If you post one of your .dat files I would be glad to look at it for
> you.
>
> Mike...

[mikeporter]

My address is mlportersr@webtv.net. By the way, who wrote the code that generated the file in the first place?Mike...