Forex Data Downloader – Updates

Here’s my method:

Save a file from MetaTrader ‘eurusd60.csv’ to a folder

Open file in wordprocessor ?????? mine’s WordPerfect
‘Convert File Format’ popup:
‘Convert file format from: ASCII DOS text’ dropdown menu ?????? OK
change ‘.’ date separators to ‘/ ‘
remove ‘,’ separators between DTOHLCV replace with 3 (?) spaces
( NB: changing the . to / and , to spaces can be done with the Find/Replace tool, but, may not be able to be done within the wordprocessor ?????? not sure why. In that case use Excel or if you have Wordpad installed that’ll also F/R. Same problem if ‘-‘ is used as a date separator.)
SaveAs/ASCII(DOS)Delimited Text (not sure what ‘delimited’ is, presume ‘ASCII DOS text’ works) save to for eg:
‘Ascii price data’ folder.

Open The Downloader

Tools/Convert ‘Convert Securities’ menu:
Source:
FileType: ASCII
Folder: where you previously SaveAs file to
File Name: SaveAs name
Destination:
FileType: MetaStock
Folder: where in MS you want file to go
OK
Ticker Symbol popup: use same or alternate SaveAs name ?????? OK

Notes:
The file format data is saved as by the data supplier doesn’t mean much, it’s the formatting of the data that usually requires reformatting; csv = comma separated values.
I SaveAs ASCII because the data is used by both MS and another charting program.
You may need to do some reformatting tests before you’re able to display a chart with MS from your converted file, so just reformat/convert 6 lines of data first rather than a whole file to learn what you have to do.
If there’s a first or last line of text above/below the price data delete it.
The date format is often the conversion problem: MT’s format is acceptable to MS: ddmmyyyy. Some data may be dmyy then change to ddmmyy ?????? a ‘0’ isn’t used before single digits ?????? just ‘2’ instead of ’02’, so that mixed date formating may be rejected during conversion. Also a ‘-‘ might be used for a date separator which has to be changed to /.
Date order may be newest first, oldest last which I change to oldest first, newest last, not sure if that needs to be done.
Conversion takes place unless there’s some formatting error, an error message will appear but no indication what the error is.
Conversion takes place with no error but chart cannot be displayed, an example of that might be the mixed date formatting. Another example would be after adding a history update to the file, a reformatting ‘mistake’ was made; save the correctly formatted 6 lines data file so you’ll have correctly formatted data to compare with if you have a conversion problem.

Hi LearnFX, no that’s just the WordPerfect’s way of doing things.
With Word you just dbl click on the csv file, or, Open, folder, set ‘All files’ in the Open menu ‘Files of Type’ to see the csv file format where it’s stored, then dbl click on the file.