>Hi John:
>Thanks for your reply. It is true, since the converters of data that I have used required the data definition files. So I will begin to enter the data with the keyboard.

I've been doing some conversions from RM Cobol, and it does have a weird data format. The index and data blocks are interspersed. I think I may still have some pieces of the converter I wrote, and it relies not on the structure being known, but on columns being recognized. From what I know about conversions from Cobol, the structure you may get is obsolete :). That's what happened to me each time I had it, and most of the time I didn't have it.

It wouldn't do you much good, because you'd lose the semantics - you'd get columns with strings, dates and numbers, but you wouldn't know what they mean. Specially the string fields containing digits, they can be split any way you like, and you wouldn't know which way is right. Having a few reports done off those data may come in handy, so you could at least recognize some columns. Still, unless there's thousands of rows in those tables, you may be better off doing data entry afresh.

One piece of advice - don't reenter historical data. Make a section, inventory, whatever, and just reenter the final state as reported by the old system, and use that as a start.