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06Honda

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 25, 2011
247
4
I use a MacBook Pro with SnowLeopard operating system and would like to be able to read my investment account data that is downloaded in a .xls format. This is the only format the brokerage firm has that I deal with. Only need to read data. Thanks for any help on this.

Paul
 
I use a MacBook Pro with SnowLeopard operating system and would like to be able to read my investment account data that is downloaded in a .xls format. This is the only format the brokerage firm has that I deal with. Only need to read data. Thanks for any help on this.

Paul
Excel, Numbers, OpenOffice, NeoOffice and many others can read Excel spreadsheets.
 
To add to what GGJ wrote above:

There is also "LibreOffice", free and seems to work very well on the Mac...
 
Change the file suffix to ".txt" and open it in TextEdit. There's a possibility that the file is really comma-separated values, rather than an actual Excel file.

I mention this because I've seen it for a few files I got from Fidelity. The suffix was ".xls" but the actual content was CSV.

If you were running Mountain Lion, then Preview could show you .xls and .xlsx files.

Not knowing your brokerage firm, maybe there's an account preference to send you PDF files. You could check for that if you haven't already done so. Personally, if I didn't see an option online, I'd phone the brokerage and ask them about it (again, assuming you haven't done so).
 
I use a MacBook Pro with SnowLeopard operating system and would like to be able to read my investment account data that is downloaded in a .xls format. This is the only format the brokerage firm has that I deal with. Only need to read data. Thanks for any help on this.

Paul

If you don't want to install any apps to do this, and if it is a relatively simple spreadsheet, you can use one of the free online office suites to do this free.

Here is Excel online. You will beed a free MS account.

https://office.live.com/start/excel.aspx

Or Goolge spreadsheet. You will need a free Gmail account.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/
 
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