CABS Viewer Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

CABS Viewer displays Daily Usage Feed Billing EMI files (as supplied by RBOCs) in to usable and readable formats for reports and publishing. It currently supports text, CSV, XML and HTML formats.

Install Questions

B01: What operating systems does CABS Viewer support?

CABS Viewer currently supports Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Sun Solaris, and Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP.

CABS Questions

C01: Where can I find the CABS BOS BDT specification?

Carrier Access Billing System (CABS) Billing Output Specifications (BOS) Billing Data Tape (BDT) record formats and data presentment formats, is the telecom industry standard carrier billing format. The majority of large access service providers issue Carrier Access Bills following the format provided in the Telcordia CABS BOS. Telcordia Technologiesż holds the copyright for the Carrier Access Billing System -- Billing Outputs Specifications (CABS BOS) documents that discuss the bill formats. The specifications can be purchased at the Telcordia Store web site.

Output Format Questions

D01: How do I load a large (over 65536 lines) CSV file into Microsoft Excel?

This is a Microsoft limitation (see http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q120596 for more information and suggested workarounds). However, you can limit the size of the output CSV by limiting the type of CABS records displayed.

Alternately, you can import your CSV file in to Microsoft Access and then access your data from Excel using Access as a data source.

D02: How can I control the format (column type or width) for an imported CSV file in Microsoft Excel?

The ugly answer is macros. More information (and some examples) can be found on http://www.mrexcel.com/archive/General/

D03: I get a " File not loaded completely" message and a truncated spreadsheet when importing a large CSV file into Microsoft Excel?

See the answer for question D01.

D04: How do I use OpenOffice's Calc to read CSV files?

OpenOffice.org's Calc spreadsheet module version 1.1.x has a dialog box that appears when opening text files, that seems to have about the same tools available in Excel's Text Import Wizard, but is not set up stepwise as Microsoft's wizards are. The more significant difference is that Calc's text import dialog runs when opening all text files, including those with extension CSV. Unfortunately, OpenOffice has a hard row limit (32768) that is worse than Excel.

Utility Questions

E01: I get a "perl command not found" error when I try to run a utility.

Be sure to install and test perl (see Appendix D of the CABS Viewer Users Guide for platform-specific install instructions) prior to running any included CABS Viewer utilities. All provided CABS Viewer utilities require perl.

Troubleshooting Questions

F01: How can I get more product help?

Before you contact Lymeware Product Support, use your software manuals (including the Users Manual) to locate the section that documents the program or feature where you are having problems. The documentation may explain the softwares behavior or give you insight to help you solve the problem.

If the problem still persists, then contact Lymeware Product Support. Two e-mail addresses are available for CABS Viewer product support or to report a potential bug in the software or documentation. Please use the following addresses:

Support@lymeware.com for all technical inquires and problem reports, including documentation issues from customers with support contracts. Customers should include relevant contact details, including company name and phone number, in initial message to speed processing. Messages that are continuations of an existing problem report should include the problem report ID in the subject line. Customers without support contracts with Lymeware Corporation should not use this address, but should contact their distributor directly.

Bugs@lymeware.com for bug reports and documentation problems.

Bug reports on software releases are always welcome. These may be sent by any means, but e-mail to the bug reporting address listed above is preferred. Please send proposed fixes and successful workarounds with the report if possible. Additional useful information would include CABS Viewer software version, hardware description, operating system version and patches, screen dumps, relevant sections of logs and configuration files, and failed message files. Any reports will be acknowledged, but further action is not guaranteed. Any changes resulting from bug reports may be included in future releases.

More information on CABS Viewer may be found on our web site http://www.lymeware.com