Re: [PCTECH] Exprting data into Excel drops leading zero

[Vern Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Changing the double quotes to single made it into a left-aligned text field 
- that is what an apostrophe in the first position has done since the 
earliest Lotus 1-2-3, IIRC. I'm using Excel 2002. When I open a CSV with 
the text below, except for single quotes in the second column, the zeroes 
are there. But so are the single quotes. If I double-click the cell and 
press Enter, the first apostrophe goes away from the cell - it's still 
there, however, since it's the alignment character.

I just googled on this and saw a couple things:
1. Use Import External Dat->Import data... to get the Text Import Wizard
2. Change the extension to .txt - then Excel will use the Text Import 
Wizard automatically
3. Prepend with an apostrophe - but saving to CSV strips it, and my 
experience is, leading apostrophe displays until you do something with the 
cell.

Of course, none of this is automatic. With the text extension, the user 
still needs to go through a bunch of steps.

I've a feeling that if one saved the result of an iSeries download to CSV, 
the leading zeroes would be stripped the next time it is opened.

Oy!

Vern

At 05:42 PM 2/24/2004 -0500, you wrote:
> I think it's double quotes, but I don't think that will help. As an
> experiment, I created a simple .CSV file in notepad:
>
> "ABCD","000123",123
> "DEF","81239",456
> "GHI","00543",789
>
> and when I opened it in Excel, the leading zeros were dropped. When I
> changed the double quotes to single quotes, they all showed up in the
> Excel spreadsheet.
>
> I agree with Adam that if you're using VB you can do a lot of formatting
> ahead of time, but in my experience doing straight downloads into Excel
> will drop leading zeros from text fields (some of our part numbers have
> leading zeros, and this has been a real pita). The only think I've seen
> that works is the HTML trick someone else pointed to (in the archives),
> but of course that means doing a lot of formatting of the data before it
> gets to Excel.
>
> If there's a better answer to this, I'd sure like to know it! :-)