Why oh why does Flash not let you manipulate data imported from a text file !?!

Hi all
I cant believe that Flash will let you load data from a text file then doesn’t allow you to do anything with
the data other than display it.
Surely there must be a way you can do something the data imported ie perform some calculations.
Is this beyond Flash or is this something that has been addressed in AS3?
All the tutorials I’ve found all stop at just displaying and ‘swonking’.
Has anyone found a work round for this?
Dave
A very disappointed newbie.