Re: Spreadsheet_Excel_Reader problem

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 6:01 PM, Jason Pruim <lists@pruimphotography.com> wrote: > > 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 :) > > That works - if I'm the first one to open the file. Often I get files that someone else opened in Excel to "fix" some things then saved back to CSV and sent merrily along. :-) Andrew