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convert wordstar maillist .mlb to word ??

Started by nojbor, August 01, 2003, 03:40:55 AM

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nojbor

can anyone please help..??

i have a floppy disc full of .mlb files which have been created using wordstar mail list program for dos

i would liek to convert them to a readable format for MS Office 2000

i only need to retrieve the mail list data once then i can continue in word or whatever

your help would be appreciated

thanks

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#1
Which version of WordStar is this from? Do you still have the program?

WordStar 7 uses DTA (data) and NDX (index) files. The DTA is just comma seperated data (CSV) format.

WordStar for Windows used dbf (Ashton Tate dBase) format files - version III, I think. These can be opened in programs like Excel, Access, or if you still have the program you can export to ASCII (CSV) format to allow more programs access.
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deedee

#2
Have you looked at the files in Word? Is it readable?

If your files have an MLB extension, it probably means that the person who created them was using WordStar DOS. One can name files whatever they like with the DOS programs, and people frequently did. That is to say, the extension MLB has no particular meaning in general or in WordStar, but only to the person who named the files.

They should be just ASCII text files, probably delimited with commas, as Mike notes. However, they don't have to be separated by commas. They can be separated by tabs or assigned to particular columns.

In any event, you should be able to read them in Word without doing anything special if they are ASCII text files (well, Word might insist that you change their extensions to TXT).

WordStar for Windows creates its mail list files, as Mike notes, in a dBASE file format. They are produced with a DBF extension.

dBASE used the same file format for all its DOS versions (as well as Windows versions), and the DBF format is an industry standard which can be imported into a wide variety of word processing as well as spreadsheet programs.

If you have the full MS Office, you can just open DBF files in Access, which is the MS data base program equivalent to dBASE.

Word is one of the word processing applications that doesn't have a filter for DBF files. So if it does turn out to be in DBF format, you would have to import it into Excel first, as Mike notes. Word does have filters for Excel.

Good luck,
deedee
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