Decimating Excel files

[mensanator at aol.com]

On Feb 3, 1:43?pm, gonzlobo <gonzl... at gmail.com> wrote:
> No, I don't want to destroy them (funny how the word 'decimate' has
> changed definition over the years) :).
>
> We have a data acquisition program that saves its output to Excel's
> .xls format. Unfortunately, the programmer was too stupid to write
> files the average user can read.
>
> I'd like some advice on how to go about:
> 1. Reading a large Excel file and chop it into many Excel files (with
> only 65535 lines per file)

An Excel sheet only has 65535 lines. Or do yo mean it has
multiple sheets?

> or
> 2. Decimate an Excel file & write... say every other line (user
> selectable)... to a new file.

Excel has VBA and can do this easily. One thing about
Excel's VBA is that it already understands Excel.

>
> I'm pretty experienced at reading and writing simple text files, but
> this is my first foray into using COM. I would imagine either choice 1
> or 2 is pretty simple once I can get the file open.

Is it the case where you have .xls files but not the application?

>
> Thanks in advance.