Admin Alert Correction: Our PC5250 Mistake, Your Gain with Two Tech Tips

by Joe Hertvik

But the silver lining is that, among the emails I received, a few readers sent me some other techniques for copying information from a 5250 screen into another program (which I also discussed in the previous tip). Here are a few bonus tips I picked up from Admin Alert readers who schooled me further on PC5250 techniques:

An IBMer, who has done extensive work in the Client Access Development Group, provided a tip for pasting columnar PC5250 data into a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, which--with a little additional testing--also helps copy the data into Microsoft Excel. The technique she uses is twofold. First, highlight the columnar data on a PC5250 screen--such as Work with Active Jobs (WRKACTJOB) information--and copy it to the clipboard by using the Edit, Copy function from the PC5250 menu bar. Then inside Lotus 1-2-3, go to the beginning cell where you want to insert the columns, and perform a Paste Special operation. A Paste Special dialogue box will appear that asks you what format the program should use when it pastes your PC5250 information into the spreadsheet. From the available choices, select Lotus' WK3 format. This will paste the data as columns into your spreadsheet in WK3 format starting at the beginning cell location.

However, a good part of the world outside IBM uses Microsoft Excel instead of Lotus 1-2-3, so I tested this technique using both Excel 97 and Excel 2000. I copied the PC5250 columnar data to my Windows clipboard, and then used the Edit, Paste Special function from the Excel menu bar to insert it into a spreadsheet. The only difference between performing this function in 1-2-3 and performing it in Excel is that Excel requires you to insert the PC5250 contents of the clipboard in BIFF3 format, rather than the WK3 format. Otherwise, they seem to work pretty much the same.

Generally, however, I found using Paste Special for inserting PC5250 columnar information into Excel wasn't really all that different than inserting it by just using Excel's regular Paste function. In both cases, I needed to copy just the columnar data to make it work. If I tried to copy the entire PC5250 screen--which contained screen titles, literals, and other information that isn't part of the column-based output--I got a messy jumble in my spreadsheet.

The other thing I noticed is Excel tends to paste the columnar information into spreadsheet columns based on where it thinks the columns are breaking, not where the column breaks actually occur on your PC5250 screen. So if your screen has one column where all the data is similar or exactly the same (such as you might see if you were copying a Work with Device Descriptions screen, where all the text column entries might read "CREATED BY AUTO-CONFIGURATION"), then Excel may read the blanks between the words as column breaks and insert each word into separate cells in different columns. You may be able to get around this limitation by copying the column headings along with the data, but your mileage may vary in producing a one-to-one PC5250-to-Excel columnar paste.

Another reader provided an easy solution for retaining screen and columnar formats when copying PC5250 data to a Microsoft Word document. To retain your formatting after pasting a PC5250 screen data into Word, he suggested I highlight the copied data inside Word and change it to a fixed width font type, such as Courier or Courier New. I tested this tip by copying a WRKACTJOB screen and pasting it into a Word 2000 document. Using my Word 2000 Normal font type of Times New Roman with a font size of 12, it was a jumbled mess. When I changed the font type to Courier New with font size 8 (our reader's recommendation), it formatted the copied text almost exactly as it appeared on the PC5250 screen. The only difference I saw was the top-line title of my screen was left justified in Word, rather than centered as it is on the PC5250 screen. If you try this tip, you may want to play around with different font types and font sizes to see which work best for you, but Courier New 8 did a nice job in my testing.