Text To Excel Formatting Problems

[+Bikebox]

I have a Magellan eXplorist 400 (my first GPS unit and I've only had it a week or two). This unit works in conjunction with the MapSend Topo 3D USA software. However, I've had the National Geographic Topo! software for sometime and have lots of hiking trails in that format (they are readily available for download). My problem is trying to get them from TOPO! to the MapSend and thus to my eXplorist 400. I'm apparently a moron. I can't figure out how to do with GPSBabel and I have been unable to make it work via Excel. I can download the trails (originally in a TPO format of some sort) to a text file, but then the trouble begins. The info is there but I can't cleanly import it into Excel and after spending an inordinate amount of time manipulating the file in Excel Pima Canyon in Tucson, Arizona, turns into a straight tropical transatlantic journey to nowhere. Excel wants to reformat the 32:21:25, -110:56:25 to time or some other calculated sum. MapSend appears to want the data as a "number" but Excel doesn't like it. I've tried "cell format" a number of different ways with no success.

 

Any help would be appreciated. I'd really like to be able to pull these routes into my GPS unit in a relatively quick and painless way, but so far no go.

[+Skeets_de]

I have a Magellan eXplorist 400 (my first GPS unit and I've only had it a week or two). This unit works in conjunction with the MapSend Topo 3D USA software. However, I've had the National Geographic Topo! software for sometime and have lots of hiking trails in that format (they are readily available for download). My problem is trying to get them from TOPO! to the MapSend and thus to my eXplorist 400. I'm apparently a moron. I can't figure out how to do with GPSBabel and I have been unable to make it work via Excel. I can download the trails (originally in a TPO format of some sort) to a text file, but then the trouble begins. The info is there but I can't cleanly import it into Excel and after spending an inordinate amount of time manipulating the file in Excel Pima Canyon in Tucson, Arizona, turns into a straight tropical transatlantic journey to nowhere. Excel wants to reformat the 32:21:25, -110:56:25 to time or some other calculated sum. MapSend appears to want the data as a "number" but Excel doesn't like it. I've tried "cell format" a number of different ways with no success.

 

Any help would be appreciated. I'd really like to be able to pull these routes into my GPS unit in a relatively quick and painless way, but so far no go.

 

Have you tried going to "Data" and then "Text to columns..."?

[SandyGarrity]

I think what is happening is Excel is looking for a CSV file to import.

 

So the data in your text file should look someting like

 

10.000, 70.000, bit of text

 

or

 

"10.000", "70.000", "bit of text"

 

HTH

[Grasscatcher]

I assume you want to export tracks?

 

Select a track and convert it to a Route in TOPO.

Export it as a text file (comma delimited or gpx)

If the TOPO ver you have exports it as a gpx file, save it then go back in and change the extension from gpx to txt. (because Excel doesn't recognize gpx as a text file) Ignore any warnings about changing the extension.

Open the txt file with Excel (select Comma delimited) and tell it to start the import with line (Probably "3", due to having 2 lines of text at the top) In other words , don't import the text lines.

 

I do it all the time but I use UTM coordinates. You may have to change the coordinate format in TOPO before you export ( to whatever format you want afterwards)

 

All the data then should line up in nice neat rows.

 

After you have the text file in Excel then you can save it as a csv file if that's what you need to proceed to the Majelly

[+Bikebox]

Thanks to all for the help, but I think I figured it out. From TOPO! I have to export the date in degrees, minutes.minutes format then bring it into Excel as standard comma delimited format, make sure the columns are named correctly (name, latitude, longitude, altitude, date, time), and save it as an Excel worksheet (.xls). After that it imports rather cleanly into Mapsend. No titles, no data, etc.

 

One weird thing -- in order for Mapsend to accept all the waypoints each one has to have a different time. I'm not even sure why the time column is there, but it gets created in TOPO!, so.... Anyway, if the first 5 have one time, the next five one time, and so on, Mapsend only imports the first waypoint for each time! 30 waypoints becomes 4 -- the path gets a little less specific that way!

 

Anyway, thanks for the helpful hints!