I know what you mean. I've worked on automated data submissions for banks in the UK, and the insistence on fixed-width, EBCDIC encoded data files for many regu

I know what you mean. I've worked on automated data submissions for banks in the UK, and the insistence on fixed-width, EBCDIC encoded data files for many regulatory filings (FSA, credit rating agencies) was annoying. On the other hand, it was so easy to automate in a VBA macro that I could have quite a bit of free time.