In one case I received an 'overflow error', (PDATConv.exe), in another it gave me output with boxes and brackets. I was only given the PDB file. Do I need an XDF file as well to do conversions?
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Export pdb file to excel
I have been asked to convert a 'pdb' file to Excel format. I have a copy of the 'pdb' file but am not sure how to accomplish this. I have tried 2 downloads that should do this conversion but neither of them worked.
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Answers
i don't know what PDATConv.exe does, but it seems to me that it does parse the PDB file correctly, but when it tries to interprete the data in it, this goes wrong because it doesn't know the structure that the original application used to pile the data into the PDB file.
the point is, a "PDB" on the palm is like a "file" on the PC: unless you have the proper application to open it, it's not really worth a lot. for example, a .DOC file itself will not be usable unless you have the WORD application that can open the DOC file and interprete its contents correctly. if you open the DOC file for instance with NOTEPAD, you will probably recognize some correct text here and there, but overall, you get a lot of gibberish, because NOTEPAD can indeed read the individual bytes of a .DOC file, but it doesn't know what to do with them. with a PDB, it's basically the same situation: you can open them, and you can identify the individual records, but you can't necessarily make sense of the data contained int these records.
so you really should know what application had created the PDB and what structure was used.
do you happen to have a hex editor handy? if so (and if the PDB doesn't contain any sensitive data), you could open the PDB file with the hex editor and post the first few lines here. this *might* help, but most probably won't, either (so don't bother looking for a hex editor if you don't already have one, anyway).
--bluelizard
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by: bluelizardPosted on 2005-09-06 at 22:26:48ID: 14834138
what is it that didn't work? it didn't recognize the pdb format? or it did convert something, but the output wasn't useful?
just FYI:
i don't know what conversion tools you used, of course, but in general, all that such a conversion tool can do is "disassemble" the pdb file into single [palm] records, which are essentially just a bunch of bytes each. without additional knowledge of the palm application that generated the pdb file, the conversion tool will not know how to interprete these bytes. so, for instance, if you use a generic conversion tool to convert the address DB, it will yield text strings like this:
???name?firstname?address?
the tool doesn't know that these are individual fields, hence it cannot single them out, either.
--bluelizard