DAT-daddy
was designed to solve a common problem litigation support professionals working in the E-Discovery field encounter every day. These professionals process large volumes of documents (Word files, other office files, email PST files, etc.) obtained at the start of a litigation matter. The files are “processed” using industry standard tools, which convert them into permanent renditions of the printed page as TIF images. The processing step also extracts metadata about the files (author, title, date sent, date received, subject, embedded text, etc.) and that information is typically delivered as a “Concordance DAT file”; referred to as the “load file”.
The load file and the TIFs are then used to load the information into a document review tool lawyers use to search for relevant information needed to resolve the litigation. The final result is some documents are “produced” and used in the litigation matter, delivering a production of documents to the opposing side. A production typically contains TIFs and a DAT load file.
DAT files
DAT files contain very unique characters to define the different fields of information. These characters were selected because they occur infrequently in most textual content. The delimiters are:
| Text Character | ASCII Substitution | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Comma | 020 | ¶ |
| Quote | 254 | þ |
| New Line | 174 | ® |
| Multi-Value | 059 | ; |
| Nested Values | 092 | \ |
A sample DAT file would look like this in a text editor
The problem with these delimiters is Excel cannot work with them and the standard Excel text file import wizard does not recognize them as potential field delimiters. Hence the birth of DAT-daddy !
DAT-daddy is a simple, inexpensive Excel add-in that enhances Excel’s import and export capabilities, to allow Excel to import files containing special delimiters. DAT-daddy works with standard Concordance delimiters, but is not restricted to them, as any character can be used to delimit fields. DAT-daddy also allows Excel data to be exported to a DAT file using the delimiters defined.
The DAT-daddy demo is a full working version, but limited to importing and exporting 10 documents. To license DAT-daddy purchase a copy and a license key will be included on your invoice.