The Report Nobody Can Get Into Excel — Turn a Legacy Printout Into a Clean Table and a Field Guide

Almost every older business system will happily print, and refuse to export. The dispatch software, the practice-management package, the accounting system from 2004 — they all produce a report that looks perfect on paper and turns into unusable mush the moment anyone opens it in a spreadsheet, because the columns were never columns. They were spaces. So the office does what offices do: somebody retypes it. Why is that worth attacking with a small piece of software instead of one more afternoon of retyping?

Because retyping is not just slow, it is unverifiable — nobody can tell you afterwards whether a row was skipped, and the report itself was printing the answer the whole time. This project builds the smallest honest thing that fixes it: a reader that turns the printout into a real table, proves it is right against the totals the old system printed itself, refuses to hand you a file when even one line does not add up, and writes down what every cryptic column heading means so the next person does not have to guess.