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bugshaw: (BugCount)
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Excel fun!

posted by [personal profile] bugshaw at 12:09pm on 13/12/2012
If you have a list of organisation codes in a csv file that you distribute, and they go in a nice alphabetical order like this:
8A001
8A003
...
8DY95
8DY99
8E004
8E008
8E017

then when you open it in Excel (which seems a fairly straightforward thing to do) the codes come out like this:
8A001
8A003
...
8DY95
8DY99
80000
800000000
800000000000000000

Let me fix that for you myself...
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There are 6 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
dalmeny: (water)

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posted by [personal profile] dalmeny at 12:40pm on 13/12/2012
Argh, I can see why it might do that. Time for the judicious application of a '.
Edited Date: 2012-12-13 12:40 pm (UTC)
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posted by [identity profile] bugshaw.livejournal.com at 12:59pm on 13/12/2012
Now I know to import it as a text file and set the code column to Text, it's fine. Except for the organisation with the name "2E2". But now I know to set the name column to text as well when I import the file...
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posted by [identity profile] hilarityallen.livejournal.com at 06:41pm on 13/12/2012
Excel does loads of fun things like that. If you have a bunch of user ids that are things like abc23, then you have one like dec23, the latter gets automatically transformed into December 23 {current-year}. So, as you've found, you have to set the column to text when you import it, so it doesn't try to be Too Bloody Clever.
Edited Date: 2012-12-13 06:42 pm (UTC)
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posted by [identity profile] bugshaw.livejournal.com at 07:23pm on 13/12/2012
Ooh, I think there are a bunch of genetic things like that too.
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posted by [identity profile] pseudomonas.livejournal.com at 11:30pm on 13/12/2012
yeah. I've been bitten by that. Proteins called things like Sept4. Annoyingly, you can't even reverse it cos you can't tell if it used to be Sept4 or Sep4.
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posted by [identity profile] maviscruet.livejournal.com at 09:22pm on 13/12/2012
Oh never seen that one before. Good old 5e2 I'm well acquainted with.......
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