Re: Anyone else having problems with ACS Data Transfer?

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 12:27 PM, Wyatt, Chris (BW-ROM)
<chris.wyatt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm attempting to download an ordinary DB/2 file into Excel that includes a Date field.

With the old Client Access transfer, the date field would hit Excel as a date. With ACS it's hitting Excel as a string. (Mucking around with the cell format does nothing.) The only way to get the field to become a date is to select the cell, move the cursor to the entry line and then press enter. It's really a drag. (There might be a better way to do this. I'm not an Excel person.)

Well, as a programmer, I'd tell you that you have better
(programmatic) options, such as using ODBC (or JDBC) to read the data
directly from the database.

But for pure manipulation using the Excel GUI, there are quicker
options than going into each cell that you need to convert. See
<https://stackoverflow.com/a/2742065/95852>, which describes how to
convert a range of strings to numbers relatively quickly. Once you do
that, you will need to (re)format the column in Excel to the date
format of your choosing. (Alternatively, between steps 1 and 2, format
the selected blank cell as a date; that way the date format gets
propagated to the range upon pasting.)

John Y.