I've got a perlscript that produces semi-colon delimited text files. 
When imported into excel, there are usually about 15 columns and 40
rows.  What I'd like to be able to do is indicate how cells should be
formatted so that when they're imported into Excel, they're already
bolded/colored/italicized/etc.  I just don't know if tags are allowed,
and if they are, what the standard is (<b>, [b]...)

Are there any excel-supported formatting tags that would survive
import from a plaintext file?

Can your perl write HTML instead? I've found that Excel will bring in
an HTML table beautifully, with fonts and colors and everything.

- Hammer

suggest you format another spreadsheet the way you want, then copy and
<paste><special><formats> onto your perlscript created sheet. Easy
enough to write a macro to do this step, so with one click, you'd get
the same result as a lot of programming.

wakerrobin, the problem with that is that i never know which cells
need highlighting, bolding, colorizing or whatever, that's determined
in the perl script.  So I was just hoping there was something I could
stick in between the ;s to indicate cell-by-cell formatting.

hammer- 

I know html pretty well, so I'll give that a try.  Just not a very elegant solution.

bisonbison: It's so simple. Next time you open the file, record a
macro while you do your formatting. Take your time, and carefully take
your steps.

--Tools-->Macro-->Record new macro
--Tell it to save in "personal..."
--Give it a keyboard shortcut
--Begin recording
--Hit Ctrl + Home (that way, no matter where your cursor is your macro
starts working in A1)
--Take all your formatting steps
--Ctrl+Home (so nothing is selected when you're done)
--Stop recording

Next time you get that CSV, open it, hit your shortcut key, and voila!

Here's some more details: http://www.theofficeexperts.com/officevba.htm#ExcelVBA

The suggestion for HTML sounds like the best one. If that doesn't
work, you could write a VB script that would parse the data after
import and apply formatting based on values in the data. It could also
do the actual import so you would only have one step.