In case of some formatting problems, you can easily change formats on bmrb website: http://www.bmrb.wisc.edu/software/starch/ Usually it's easy even to "make" Sparky format in excel (if you don't know how to do it in terminal), use "Concatenate" command to add text together, for example: Q1N-HN-CA-CB-C, then Sparky format looks like: Assignment w1 w2 w3 w4 w5 Q1N-HN-CA-CB-C 123.046 8.298 53.18113 26.51555 175.4883 G2N-HN-CA-CB-C 103.031 5.632 41.25012 80.24249 176.281 BMRB asks for: Input file must contain column names in the first line. First column must contain residue sequence numbers, second column: residue labels (pref. PDB Ligand Expo Component Identifiers). Names of the first two columns are ignored, names of subsequent columns are used for atom names. Data lines (starting from the 2nd line) must contain residue sequence number, label, followed by shift values.