Converting from SuperCalc

Those who remember SuperCalc have automatic membership in the "I Remember When" club. SuperCalc was a spreadsheet program designed by Gary Balleisen and published in the early 1980s by a company called Sorcim. (The first edition was for the CP/M operating system.) In 1984 the product was purchased by Computer Associates, and they published it for several years. SuperCalc predates Excel by quite bit.

Many companies and individuals used SuperCalc, and have subsequently standardized on using Excel. If you have some old SuperCalc spreadsheet files laying around, you may be wondering how to convert them to Excel. Current versions of Excel don't include SuperCalc filters; they were last included in Excel 95.

Converting files if you still have SuperCalc installed on a system is a snap--all you need to do is export the SuperCalc workbook in Lotus 1-2-3 format, and then you can import it into Excel. Lotus filters are much more common in the Excel world than many other filters. You could also, if you have Excel 95 installed on an old system, try to do the conversion using that version of Excel, and then load the converted Excel file into a newer version of Excel.

If you have a very valuable file you need to convert, or if you have quite a few files to convert, you might give some thought to using a third-party company to do the conversion. A quick Google search for "SuperCalc conversion" turns up quite a few potential resources for this approach.