I primarily use the visual analysis features of Metastock. I have many layouts that I have created over the years. All of the layouts have several charts and indicators, and each chart has hundreds of trendlines, vertical lines that I have manually added, notes I've written, etc. Overall this comes to thousands of hours of work.

As I've upgraded through versions of metastock, my layouts have slowly become very buggy. Sometimes the analysis will show up on one chart in the template, but the rest of the charts only show the indicator. Then if I open x-axis properties and click "OK" without even changing anything, all my analysis shows up! In addition, I get errors about "Missing smartchart" data because of folders that have changed over the years.

I've been trying to find some sort of text-editor that would open up the .mwl layout files so that I could edit them in a script format, but I haven't had any luck at all with that. Does anyone know a way to do that, or any other way to fix these layouts without losing all of my analysis and work? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Steve