Situation:
I am pulling information from a database and exporting it into an Excel 2010 template. The data consists of unique IDs (numeric), dates, and text in their respective columns. When going to sort, Excel usually recognizes the unique IDs as text and gives me the option of 'A-Z' which yields the correct result.
Problem:
Occasionally when sorting the unique IDs, Excel will give me the option to sort from 'Smallest to Largest' and when this happens the report yields a wildly incorrect result.
Pattern:
The sorting criteria is the only common denominator when a report fails, which makes little sense as they are both ascending orders. This issue only occurs ~20% of the time. The other times it sorts correctly from 'A-Z' as it does in the other worksheets within the same template.
-I've tried changing Number Format within the drop down to 'Text' 'General' and 'Numbers'
-I've tried manually sorting the data through filters as opposed to sort hierarchies
-I've tried clearing the table, and re-copying/pasting the data into the template's worksheet. This seems to work, but as the end goal is automation, I'd like to find out what the root cause is.
Expected result: Numeric data copied and pasted into the field to be sorted from 'A-Z', resulting in a successful report.
Actual result: Numeric data copied and pasted into the field typically results in the sort option of "A-Z', but occasionally sorts from 'Smallest to Largest' resulting in a failed report.
Excel is designed for numbers - and is generally very helpful in coercing text to numbers where appropriate. However, once in Number format the reverse is not easy. As you have discovered, merely choosing Text as format is not enough.
A clue is whether or not (assuming activated) the cells show green triangles.
Other than starting afresh with data entry into a cell already formatted as Text, the conventional solution for conversion with code is to prepend a quote, though appending a space would also serve.
Other than that, the easiest mass conversion approach may be to copy into Word (Keep text only) and copy back to Excel with pasting as Text.
The better solution may be to store IDs as text and prepend 0s to a standard length.
Related
I have an Excel sheet with a very wide table on it. Due to developer friendlyness I'd like to use a certain style of column header naming (much like proper Hungarian notation), where I suffix each header name with "column type" tags. This allows me to easily spot where e.g. apples and oranges are compared. There are also pivot table reports based on this table.
An example to illustrate this: say you have 2 monetary columns, column A being expressed in another currency than column B. The model should thus never combine them without first applying appropriate exchange rates. To spot this I name these columns e.g. Earned - Cur1 and Saved - Cur2. Any calculation like =[#[Earned - Cur1]] + [#[Saved - Cur2]] is illegal, but due to the tags this can be picked up easily in an audit. I have several such tag groups in use already, and they already prevented some errors creeping in.
However...
The file also needs to be distributed to lots of not-so-savvy end users, and they need to fill in this table and refer to some of the outcome columns. Most intermediate columns we already hide, but the column names are now far from being user-friendly (like: fill out Actual - NK/Q1/EC/%, please?).
And this needs to run in Excel 2010.
What are my options?
Option 1
Add an extra row above the table, putting human readable names in there, and just hide the table header row. This works, but not the users can't sort and filter the table anymore, so that's a no-go.
Option 2
Augment option 1 by prepending a newline to each column name, and make the table header row 1 character high. The header cells would still be there to drive sorting and filtering and the users have human readable names in the row above. The actual header cells would appear like 'empty' buttons. Could work, but then the complex formulas become unreadable due to all the newlines from the column names all over the place.
Option 3
Add a macro that switches the headers in the table by alternative headers in another row above the table. The macro should be ran just before sending out the file to the users, and ran again when they return them filled in and all. I happily coded this option into the file, and it works wonderfully! But then I realized this (and thus option 2 as well) breaks all the derived pivot tables, since Excel links the data by the names used in the table - update the name, and that section of the pivot will be dropped...
I'd really like the option of having our development-oriented column names in there when we ourselves work with the file, but being able to switch out the headers when needed. And of course without rebuilding all the pivots after each such switch.
An opening here would be that pivots seem to only drop the columns once they're refreshed. I could use this to update the header names, then do some magic on the pivots to remap their fields, and only then refresh them, but it seems there's no way from within VBA to accomplish that (PivotField.SourceName is read only).
Hopefully someone can think of an alternative, or am I SOL? I'm totally open to other workarounds.
Workaround 1
Insert null-terminating characters in the header names such that they do not show normally in the formulas, but do not show in the table header row. If only it were that simple though... Turns out Excel throws up from a =Char(0)&"abc", and things like =Char(8)&"abc" (tab anyone?) give Unicode replacement characters when pasted into a header cell... (?)
Workaround 2
A last resort seems to be to unzip the excel file, and plough through the xml data to update everything in one go there, then rezip the file. But this code also needs to be executed by less skilled users, and I see too many ifs and buts to make me feel safe using this setup.
Workaround 3
For now I just use a variation on option 2; I have some VBA that 'empties' the header cells instead of prepending a newline to them. By 'emptying' I mean setting the font size to 1, subscript, non-bold, and then make the font color identical to the background color, followed by setting it's row height to the default 14.5. The cryptic names do leak out however; column header cell drop down arrows for sorting&filtering show the cryptic name, as well as the pivot field settings and of course the formula bar when you just click such a cell. But I guess it's the best I can do?
And then again I'm probably just perfectionizing this thing faaar to much :) But from this point on it's about the challenge!
Make sure you Tick the Box "Add this data to the DataModel" when creating your pivot(s)
AFAIK when your Pivots are connected to the Datamodel instead of directly to the Range/Table you can change your column-names in the Table and your Pivot will stay fine. You could even use other names in your Pivot.
So i have some rdfs that download from the server through rwservlet as excels (xls). My question is: can i use excel formulas like sum on the report returned data?
I tried formatting the data (i think here relies the problem as it seem it doesn't affect the data that's already there) and modifying the decimal separator to "." from the rdf. Neither work, not separate or together; the sum formula returns 0. However if i overwrite new data over report data in a field, sum works.
It seems to me it sees all the data returned from the report like text and the formatting doesn't affect the already there data.
Thank you
I go to the root of the problem: the format mask in the rdf was adding a space for sign for the positive numbers. Hence excel was not recognizing it as a number. Problem is after i put a "-" in the format mask to get rid of the space excel re-formats the number automatically from 1.00 to 1 for example. So basically the format mask in the rdf is overwritten, i could not use it at all and i'd get the same result.
I'm trying to read an Excel sheet from an XLS or XLSX file in memory using Delphi 7. When possible I use automation to read the cells one by one, but when Excel is not installed, I revert to using the ADO/ODBC Jet driver.
I connect using either
Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0; Data Source=file.xls;Extended Properties="Excel 8.0;Persist Security Info=False;IMEX=1;HDR=No";
Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0; Data Source=file.xlsx;Extended Properties="Excel 12.0;Persist Security Info=False;IMEX=1;HDR=No";
My problem then is that when I use the following query:
SELECT * FROM [SheetName$]
the returned results do not contain the empty rows or empty columns, so if the sheet contains such rows or columns, the following cells are shifted and do not end up in their correct position. I need the sheet to be loaded "as is", ie know exactly from what cell position each value comes from.
I tried to read the cells one by one by issuing one query of the form
SELECT F1 FROM `SheetName$A1:A1`
but now the driver returns an error saying "There is data outside the selected region". btw I had to use backticks to enclose the name because using brackets like this [SheetName$A1:A1] gave out a syntax error message.
Is there a way to tell the driver to select the sheet as-is, whithout skipping blanks? Or maybe a way to know from which cell position each value is returned?
For internal policy reasons (I know they are bad but I do not decide these), it is not possible to use a third party library, I really need this to work from standard Delphi 7 components.
I assume that if your data is say in the range B2:D10 for example, you want to include the column A as an empty column? Maybe? Is that correct? If that's the case, then your data set, when you read the sheet (SELECT * FROM [SheetName$]) would also return 1 million rows by 16K columns!
Can you not execute a query like: SELECT * FROM [SheetName$B2:D10] and use the ADO GetRows function to get an array - which will give you the size of the data. Then you can index into the array to get what data you want?
OK, the correct answer is
Use a third party library no matter what your boss says. Do not even
try ODBC/ADO to load arbitrary Excel files, you will hit a wall sooner or later.
It may work for excel files that contain a single data table, but not when you want to cherry pick data in a sheet primarily made for human consumption (ie where a single column contains some cells with introductory text, some with numerical data, some with comments, etc...)
Using IMEX=1 ignores empty lines and empty columns
Using IMEX=0 sometimes no longer ignores empty lines, but now some of the first non empty cells are considered field names instead of data, although HDR=No. Would not work anyway since valules in a column are of mixed types.
Explicitly looping across cells and making a SELECT * FROM [SheetName$A1:A1] works until you reach an empty cell, then you get access violations (see below)
Access violation at address 1B30B3E3 in module 'msexcl40.dll'. Read of address 00000000
I'm too old to want to try and guess the appropriate value to use so it works until someone comes with yet another mix of data in a column. Sorry for having wasted everybody's time.
I am importing data from an Excel file into a Filemaker Pro database (FMP 12.0 v5 for Mac). I am using the imported data to "Update matching records in found set". However, the field that I am using to match occasionally contains trailing zeros.
When importing, FMP does not match the fields correctly, because it ignores the trailing zeros.
To explain further: the field in the database is a calculated text field, "courseID.personID", determined by concatenating the numerical "courseID" and "personID" fields (with a dot in between them). The field in my Excel file is formed similarly, using Excel formulae. Some "personID" values end in a zero, e.g. 120, and so courseID.personID becomes something like "123.120". I am matching the Excel field to the FMP field.
I first noticed this was happening, and was very careful to go back to Excel and make a new file (to start fresh), select all cells and set format to Text. Then, I did a Paste Special from my original data, and selected Paste as Values. All the cells in the courseID.personID column gave a "number stored as text error", with the option to convert the text to numbers. I selected the option to ignore the error, to leave all the data stored as text, with the intention of preserving the trailing zeros.
Alas, the issue persists. So, does anyone have any ideas of how to force Excel to format and communicate the proper values? Or, is it an issue of making FMP interpret the data properly, maybe by adjusting field types?
the field in the database is a calculated text field,
"courseID.personID", determined by concatenating the numerical
"courseID" and "personID" fields (with a dot in between them). The
field in my Excel file is formed similarly, using Excel formulae.
Come to think of it, the simplest solution would be to eliminate the calculation fields and use the original values for the import:
I'm using excel 2007.
I've a list of tasks (200-500) that I need to group in different category/section etc (multiple filters). Whole data is in excel table so I can apply Excel's build-in table filters to display exact data that I need.
However it is always difficult to apply multiple filter to display expected data, specially as I need to do it very frequently. To make things simple I'm planning to number each record like
a.b.c.d.e.f
Where a, b, c, d, e, f are simple numbers. List looks like:
1
1.1
1.2
1.2.1
1.2.1.1
1.2.2
1.3
& so on.
Problem is, Excel take it as number with single decimal but as soon as I add second decimal, excel treat it as text, which is obvious in general behavior.
However, as special case, I need excel treat both as number or text. Number is preferable as I want to sort them, which might be difficult as a text.
To make the things little more complex, while filtering in table, I require if I can add some formula to filter results like 1.* should display all numbers starts with 1.
Is it possible with excel's default behavior, without VBA?
If no, is it possible with VBA? If yes, any clue is appreciated. I don't need whole program as I can write basic VBA program, just a clue how it can be done?
I sort mine by adding a helper column that adds a letter to the front and sort on that. E.g. 1 becomes f1, 1.1 becomes f1.1 etc. Then all are sorted as text.
You can use the formula ="f" & A1.
My sample:
Then the data sorted:
And the filter:
If I were to try this without VBA, my first step would be to use the sort to columns function on the data tab.
Next make sure all empty spaces in your data are filled with zeros.
Then sort the data by column
as long as you left your original data in the same row as the sorted data (I didn't in the images posted to focus on the process), your items should now be in order.