Hello.

I'm not necessarily new to programming (in fact I've knew about gamedev for years now), but I'm not the best either.

But before going into too much details into me, I am wondering how to make a program open and gather information out of another program and insert data it into another one.

To be clear, I work gathering loads of data. I test cable lines and knowing the peak of lines, and distance is important. This data is saved as a ".dat" file and contains important information that is usually repeated throughout the testing process. What I want, is to retrieve certain elements of that file (peak, distance, etc) and create a file that can embed the information into Excel (or excel like workbook).

I also want to create a ".txt" file (manually using notepad) and have that imported into Excel (or an excel like workbook).

I also want the program to read file names (inside a folder) and check to see if I have all the files needed and if not which ones are missing or which ones are named incorrectly.

This is important to me because I'm spending days just compiling different lines but the same information into excel sheets, and if I could just make something that reads the file and insert them automatically that will save me so much time.

I don't intend to crack, alter, or do anything malicious to the software I'm reading, but I do want to be able to pull information out and place into another one.

I hope you guys can help me so I can save myself the headache of working night and day doing the same monotonous work. Thanks.

It sounds like you need a script. It depends on the platform, but you can write a bash (on unix) or ar batch (on windows) file and do those things. You can check directories and files and then open or close other applications with the input and output needed.

Also, you can do those things with other less frustrating and flexible languages like Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language), but I'm not sure how easy you can open other apps with that program (basically, you're creating a new process, and that is platform dependant).

If you wan't to write lines to an opened Excel file... I have no idea if that's possible.