Re: Spreadsheet_Excel_Reader problem

On Mar 18, 2010, at 1:26 PM, Andrew Ballard wrote:

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 1:00 PM, Ashley Sheridan <ash@ashleysheridan.co.uk> wrote: [snip]

And I believe that when MS Office saves a CSV out with a character other than a comma as the delimiter, it still saves it as a .csv by default.

Nope. If you save as CSV, it is comma-separated with double-quotes as the text qualifier. There is also an option to save in tab-delimited format, but the default extension for that is .txt. The only issue I have with Excel handling text files is with columns like ZIP code that should be treated as text (they are string sequences that happen to contain only numeric digits where leading zeros are significant) but are interpreted as numbers. Andrew

Hi Andrew, As a fellow mailing list processor I can feel your pain... One thing I have found is when you are importing the data, you can select the zip column and change the format from "general" to "text" and it will maintain the leading zero's. Or a simple filter applied to it afterwards will help to. But if you have a decent CASS software then it should add the zip back in hehe :)