Can Excel work getting data with formatting instructions

[philky001]

I have a project that will let our legacy programmers, who still support customers on Cobol and what not; their reports are text based. Suppose we setup groups of templates so that the programmer can direct columns as bold or add spacing. then we can send this to an excel file and we want all these formating features in the excel.

Can this be done, what is the process for this?

 

[Derek Brown]

My first thought would be to consider linking through a Microsoft Access database.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access-help/import-or-link-to-data-in-a-text-file-HA001232227.aspx
The first part would be to link the text file to Access.
The second part would be to link the Access table (or query, perhaps) to Excel. You did not say which version of Office is being used but if it is, for example 2007, it would appear as a table in Excel. Formatting in that table is retained when the data is refreshed. Changes to the text file would then update in the workbook.
I have not actually used the first part of that action as I process text files using Excel VBA to format them as required but I do use Access with various databases and Excel workbooks as linked tables to quickly create/update Excel reports.