I need help in converting this text value exported in text format from software management tool "Apr 06, 2020" to data format.
I have tried various methods like text to columns then picked all of the possible data formats but nothing works. Can you please help or suggest any solution?
Your problem is a mismatch between your Windows Regional Settings (which Excel relies on in order to parse your date), and the date format in the exported file (which appears to be US-English).
You have several choices:
If the file exported from your management tool is a text or csv file, you can probably use Power Query to import the file. Select Transform then right click on the Date column and select Change type => Using Locale => and select Date and English-US.
You could change your regional settings to English(united states) while you do the import, then change them back.
If none of the dates get converted, you could try this formula:
=DATE(RIGHT(A1,4),MATCH(LEFT(A1,3),{"Jan";"Feb";"Mar";"Apr";"May";"Jun";"Jul";"Aug";"Sep";"Oct";"Nov";"Dec"},0), MID(A1,5,2))
Note that in the formula, you may need to change the commas to semicolons, or whatever your country uses to separate formula arguments
You can use below formula, Where A1 is date cell
=DATEVALUE(MID(A1,5,2)&"-"&LEFT(A1,3)&"-"&RIGHT(A1,4))
I have a csv file with numbers written in scientific notation (ex. 2.8570890426635534e-05 ) but when i open the csv in excel ( both by opening directly and by importing data in the Data tab) the number that excel display is 2,87509E+11.
I have even tried to change the encoding format when reading the csv (ISO, WINDOWS, DOS, UTF-8, ...) but none of them seems to work properly.
Anyone knows where the problem might be ?
If you are importing using Power Query from the Data tab, after selecting to Import:
Transform
Right click on the column
Change Type / Using Locale
Data Type: Decimal Number
Locale English (United States)
In the Applied Steps menu, you will see
Changed Type
Changed Type with Locale
Delete that first Changed Type step.
I have a new install of Excel 2016, that hates CSV files. It opens them with everything in one column flagpole style, down column A, with commas and speech marks visible.
Salient points:
I have two machines, desktop and laptop, both running same version of Excel. Desktop works fine, opens the same problem files formatted correctly.
I can create CSV files on laptop, save those, open them again on laptop, and it's fine.
Even opening it in Notepad++, saving in the hope of some sort of file format normalisation, and still no good.
I have compared regional settings and almost all settings in Excel.
I tried renaming the file to TXT, it brought up the text file conversion dialogue, I chose comma delimited. First time it ignored that, still got everything in column A, second attempt, that actually worked, however, that is a pants solution, I want to be able to just natively open CSV files without saving as TXT, I use many different ones every day.
Anyone got any ideas?
Thanks in advance.
CSV files are character separated value files, not necessarily comma separated. For more than half the world the separator character is a semicolon (;), not a comma (,)
Excel 2016 properly respects your Windows regional settings, and uses the specified List Separator character
One solution is to change your regional settings for the List Separator attribute to the character you want Excel to default to using, e.g. a comma (,)
This can be changed in the operating system Control Panel, under Region settings, Additional Settings, List separator
For various reasons some people seem to have the incorrect regional settings for the culture they most commonly work in, and therefore have semicolon as the default separator
If you prefer not to change your operating system regional setting to what you think is normal for CSV files, you can change the default behavior in Excel with the Use system separators checkbox under the File/Options/Advanced menu
If you want custom options each time you open a CSV file, use the Data/From Text menu, but this becomes slow and awkward for lots of files
CSV References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator (see map of world using comma as decimal point separator, it's very common, and hence CSV's often use semicolon separators)
https://data-gov.tw.rpi.edu/wiki/CSV_files_use_delimiters_other_than_commas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values (spec point 3)
https://ec.europa.eu/esco/portal/escopedia/Comma-separated_values_%2528CSV%2529
https://parse-o-matic.com/parse/pskb/CSV-File-Format.htm
I've found a way of saving messy CSV files into a nice table format but I'm not sure if it will work for your case.
Data -> New Query -> From File -> From CSV
By opening the CSV file this way, a pop-up 'Query Editor' window will appear with a nicely organised table format where you can edit, save and load into your excel sheet.
I hope this helps.
For me the solution was to:
Data > From Text > Choose your csv file
Then you can define all the import settings for csv files.
I found another way to fix this, without changing your windows local settings.
In Excel, you go to File > Options > Advanced.
Un-check the "Use System Separators" within the Editing Options and change the Decimal separator with "," and the Thousands Separator ".".
Even it does look more like a bug than a feature of Excel 2016, it works without changing the Windows Local settings, and it's just a local Excel change.
Just had this same problem. Changing the file extension from csv to txt and opening in Excel brings up the classic wizard so you can map the strings to fields.
The correct answer is to edit your regional settings as suggested above (if a long term change in behavior is desired)
Control Panel -> Region -> Additional Settings -> List separator:
But for my purposes a simple Edit -> Find and Replace using Notepad to replace all commas with semi-colons was a quick and dirty solution that I preferred.
Despite the comment that csv means 'Character Separated Values', in Office 2016 my .csv file association to Excel still says 'Microsoft Excel Comma Separated Values File'.
I have quite a complex csv file where none of the suggestions worked out for me. So I ended up using LibreOffice Calc for the job. It worked like a dream.
I had the same problem, I fixed it in this way (Excel 2020)
Data -> Text to Columns
Now you can configure as you wish the CSV delimiters/endlines...
I had the same issue on Mac OS X El Captain. The answer given here worked for me. Reproducing it here in case the link doesnt work in future:
Close the Excel application
Click on the Apple button
Select System Preferences
Select Language and Region
Click Advanced
Change the Decimal separator from a comma (,) to a full stop (.)
Then click on Ok/Save
Test the Excel import again
When changing the list separator, make sure it doesn't overlap with the decimal symbol and the digit grouping characters. I had to change my list separator to (,) my decimal to (.) end my digit grouping to ('). Now .CSV opens lekker!!!
In my excel, it's: data> get data> from file> from text/csv
Try opening in excel, then using text to columns, based on commas.
You could probably create some simple vba to open it in that way too.
In many EU countries a comma ',' is used as the decimal separator, whereas in the US a dot '.' is used.
CSV (Comma Separated Values) files are supposed to use the comma to separate cell values. However, often a tab '\t' or other characters are used instead.
What's interesting, Excel if you save a .csv file using Microsoft Excel in a EU country using the comma as a decimal separator, the value it uses to separate cell values is not an escaped comma, but a semicolon ';'. Looking on the net it seems that, if you are in the US, Excel will save .csv files using a proper comma (I can't verify this).
I'm trying to find a way to create a csv file that can be recognized by Excel without any user action, both in the EU and the US.
Here's an example using Excel with an Italian locale
The above, saved as .csv (MS-DOS), translates to
foo;foo bar;
foo'bar;"foo""bar";
foo,bar;foo.bar;
foo:bar;"foo;bar";
foo/bar;foo\bar;
"foo
bar";foo|bar;
foo;bar;foobar
this is to make the empty line appear
It may be possible that, depending on the local "list separator", this may not be recognized correctly.
I've read that the new Excel 2013 needs sep=; to be set as the first line in order to work correctly. This is an ugly hack, but it seems to also be working for Excel 2010 (except it gets overwritten on save)...
Does the above text work for you, if you save it as a csv?
Is there a less hacky way to tell Excel which character is the cell separator, without having the user to set things up?
Thanks.
Time to head back to a time before visual anything, and grab a command from the past. It will involve you manually writing the file out with VBA, but it has the criteria you expect: Write
Open "c:\tmp\myfile.csv" for output as #1
for i=1 to 100
write #1,range("A"&i),range("B"&i),range("C"&i)
next i
close #1
You will have to do a little manual work - it doesn't translate a single quote into a double quote, but the rest is as desired:
the Write # statement inserts commas between items and quotation marks around strings as they are written to the file
Numeric data is always written using the period as the decimal separator.
Dates are written as #yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss#
When I import document from google keyword tool some curency values are converted to date for example 5.21 is converted to May 21. However there are some in the same column that are not conveted. What should I do that my document would not be disorted ? Tried to remove text proofing when typing, however I have document prewriten by google so it dosen't help.
Your regional settings seem to have the dot in the date format, with an order of MDY, so Excel will interpret a number like 5.21 as a date, but a number like 5.66 will remain a number.
Try exporting the Google output to a text file. Then open the text file with Excel via the File > Open menu. This will bring up the text import wizard. In Step 3 of the wizard you can select each column of data and specify what data type it contains, i.e. to tell Excel what each column contains.
You regional settings may also be set to have a comma as the decimal separator. In this case, Excel will not recognize 5.21 as a number at all. You can
change the Google output to produce numbers like 5,21 or
temporarily change your regional settings to use the format Google serves you
mark the column as text and import it as text, then use find and replace on that column to replace the decimal character with the one your system uses.