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Advice to Organisers Format Conversion

Audax UK asks for your results to be submitted in plain text format.
Other file types (eg DOC, RTF, XLS, WK*, DBF, HTM) are acceptable but plain text is best, not least because you can just paste it into the body of an e-mail.
The TXT file format has been chosen as the lowest common denominator between all those pieces of software that are in use out there. Excel, Word, Approach, 123, Wordperfect, dBase, etc etc - they all do a good job but they all do it differently. Fortunately, they can all generate a simple text file, although sometimes its not at all obvious how it's done.

On a Windows PC, a very simple procedure is - from your preferred program whatever that may be, cut & paste your data into Notepad. If it looks OK in Notepad, then it is OK, and all you need then do is save the notepad file to floppy disk as RESULTS.TXT, or paste it into an e-mail.

A practical example - EXCEL -
A popular program used by several organisers is Microsoft Excel. In Excel or in any other Windows spreadsheet program such as 123 or Quattro, simply select the column containing membership numbers - by clicking on the column header, a, b, c etc.
The column is now highlighted.
Use Edit/Copy [CTRL_C] to put this in the clipboard.
Open Notepad.
Use Edit/Paste [CTRL-V].
Save the resulting file as RESULTS.TXT

(If your event is BRM and you need to add times, it gets a bit more difficult - see note at foot of this page.)

If the file doesn't look right - there may be spaces before the numbers for example - then simply edit it in Notepad until it does look right - like this -

Another example - WORD
The same technique - copy, then paste into Notepad - would work in Word, WorPerfect, Ami Pro, Word Pro, Windows Write, etc. It will be difficult to separate out the membership numbers at the copying stage, so you have to 'clean up' the file once in Notepad.

Databases such as Lotus Approach can usually offer a tabular view which can be treated just like the spreadsheet example above.
Incidentally, Lotus Approach is the software that is actually used to process this event information by Audax UK.

Alternatively, most software including non-Windows programs which may not have Copy & Paste facilities, can export their files as text. In the File menu, look for 'Save As' or Export' and then investigate the various file formats on offer, you will often find various flavours of 'Text' such as 'Fixed-width', 'Comma-delineated', 'Tab-delineated', 'ASCII', 'ANSI' and very often another useful format called 'CSV'.
Any of these will give a good starting point for making a file like the one above, probably the best of these is the 'Comma-delineated' or 'CSV' choice - these actually give identical results but the filename is different. Any of these can be loaded into Notepad and processed further. Often the numbers will be "enclosed" in quotes - that's OK, no need to remove those.
If you are using 'Export' rather than 'Save As' then you will probably be given options as to which columns, or 'fields', to export - you can then choose to export only the membership numbers - and, if appropriate, time.

To return to the EXCEL example - if your event is BRM you need to include a 2nd column Time, in your Cut & Paste. This is more elaborate.
First, in your spreadsheet, insert a new column adjacent to, and to the right of, your membership number column. Now select the time column and Copy the contents. Now Paste into the new column, making sure your cursor is at the top of the new column in the row corresponding to the first rider in the list.
Now select the 2 adjacent columns together and copy and paste into Notepad. Close up any gaps in Notepad and save as RESULTS.TXT