If you receive the error message "Failed to load SeaBASS File" followed by another message such as "/missing is not a valid number" or another message, it is likely due to changes to the SeaBASS file made when editing it in Excel that caused your altered version to break one or more of the rules for the SeaBASS file format. That makes SeaDAS's SeaBASS-reader unable to open it properly. Here are three of the most common ways that spreadsheet programs inadvertently violate the SeaBASS file format. Open your new SeaBASS file in a plain text editor to verify the following:
1) Make sure the delimiter you used to save the text file is consistent with the SeaBASS metadata header called /delimiter. SeaBASS files are allowed to have a data matrix delimited by comma, space, or tab, but SeaBASS-readers need it labeled correctly. For example, it's possible the original SeaBASS file had /delimiter=tab, but when you re-saved it, the spreadsheet program changed the output to contain comma delimiters.
The quick fix that usually works is to use the spreadsheet program to re-save the file using comma delimiters. If necessary, then open the file in a text editor and change the appropriate metadata header to:
/delimiter=comma
2) Most spreadsheet programs will automatically append a bunch of unwanted delimiters to the header section of your new SeaBASS file to try to match the number of columns in the data matrix. For example, if you saved the file with comma delimiters and you open it in a plain text editor, you might see that it now contains rows like this:
/begin_header,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
/received=20150519,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
/identifier_product_doi=10.5067/SeaBASS/CLIVEC/DATA001,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
If you need a quick fix to that sort of situation, open the file in a plain text editor and search and replace for commas that are at the end of a line (don't replace ALL commas since that will smush all the data values together). If your text editor's 'search and replace' functionality supports regular expressions, you could try searching for the 3-character pattern ,+$ and replace them with nothing.
3) Finally, sometimes the spreadsheet program will add quotes around certain lines in your metadata header. Those can be slightly more annoying to remove, but you can either search and replace them, or else manually remove them; it's not usually very many lines that are affected.
That should address the most common problems. FYI, if you or someone else is still struggling to check if a file is valid SeaBASS format, you can test by running it through the SeaBASS
FCHECK utility~Chris
