Excel: Lotus WK3 File Has Unrecognizable Character Strings

• Microsoft Excel for Windows, versions 3.0, 4.0, 4.0a. 5.0

SUMMARY

If you are using Microsoft Excel and you open a Lotus WK3 file that contains characters from the Lotus MultiByte Character Set (LMBCS), Microsoft Excel may not display or print these characters correctly. The LMBCS extended character set has only limited support in Microsoft Excel. As a result, text that is displayed in Lotus with, for example, a subscripted footnote number 2, is displayed in Microsoft Excel as "text|u2|0u" (without the quotation marks).

MORE INFORMATION

The LMBCS character set was initially developed for Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3 and includes all the characters contained in LICS, ASCII, and most other international character sets. If Microsoft Excel can map the LMBCS code for a particular character to a corresponding ANSI code (the character set used by Microsoft Windows), the character will be displayed correctly; however, if Microsoft Excel is unable to map a the code to an ANSI character, Microsoft Windows will substitute a fallback character. In the case of a string of codes, as in the above example, Microsoft Excel will convert the string to text.

There is no workaround to automatically convert these text strings to characters in Microsoft Excel. To display the actual character or a similar character, you will have to use alternate methods. For example, to add a subscript number 2 to some text, you would need to create a text box containing the number and position it next to the text.

REFERENCES

"User's Guide," version 5.0, chapter 3 "Lotus for Windows," version 1.1, pages 361-370