Excel showing weird thousand separator - excel

I use Microsoft Excel 2010 and my Excel shows thousand separators in a really weird manner. It has been doing so ever since I installed it, so this is not due to something that I changed later. You can see in the pic below how my Excel separates thousands in a big number:
This is through the default Comma Style format. I have even tried to make it custom by setting it to #,### and #,##0.00 but it still shows the same weird separation. Any idea how this can be fixed?

By default, MS Excel uses computer regional settings when displaying number or date formats.
Go to Control Panel, Regional Settings/Region and Language(it depends by operating system) and select a different country if necessary, but especially check Number Format (Additional Settings). See Digit grouping symbol and Digit grouping.
Change Digit grouping to 123,456,789:

Found the solution.
The issue was in the Regional settings. My Digit Grouping in the Numbers tab and Currency tab were different. Once I set them both to the same format, Excel stopped showing me the random grouping it was showing earlier.
Thanks everyone for pointing me in the right direction.

Related

I can't use the cell content and do formulas with it

Currently I've made an excel document where it gets it data from a website with the help of "Data - From Web".
I've gotten this part to work, however i need to use the cell-content in some of the cells to do calculations, but it appears that these are not values (i believe they are text-strings?!)
Some searching gave me the tip to use the =Value() function but this seems not to work as intended (see picture).
I need help to make sure that my table is usable.
Sidenote, I have a feeling that the decimal indicator is an dot "." however my excel uses a comma ","
Your help/assistance is much appreciated!
I suspect the download is using dot as the decimal separator and your Windows Regional Settings are using something else. If that suspicion is correct, when you set up the query (or Edit the current query)
select Transform instead of Load (or edit the current query)
Select the numeric columns
From the right-click menu on one of the columns, select Change Type -> Using Locale and select Decimal Number from English(United States)
That should enable the values to be converted to numeric values you can use. And that should maintain whenever you update the query.

Downloading Tableau data into Excel (scientific notation column)

Within one of my Tableau reports, I have an Acquirer Reference Number field which is 23 digits long. When the data downloads into Excel, Excel truncates the column and shows it as scientific notation (shown below) instead of the full 23 digit number. I know this isn't a Tableau issue, but I was wondering if anybody has ran into this issue and what the workaround is.
I have tried to reformat this column in Excel after the data is downloaded, but it converts the last several digits to 0s.
I want the full Acquirer Reference Number to be displayed like this: 24692168345100558990040 instead of like this: 2.46921690161007E+22.
It looks like there is a known 15 digit limitation due to the floating point numbering system used behind the scenes in Excel:
https://superuser.com/questions/373997/adding-more-than-15-digits-in-excel
(Take note that it appears that Tableau has the same 15 digit floating point limitation when it comes to measures and mathematical operations.)
I have reproduced your situation, and even when the Acquirer Reference Number is within Tableau as a Dimension and even when it is also converted to a 'String' type - it will still export to Excel in scientific notation.
The only workaround I've been able to find is to instead of "Exporting Data" to instead "Export Crosstab to Excel" as seen below in the "Worksheet" Menu. The result is similar to that of putting an apostrophe in front of every cell in the Excel workbook. It doesn't look as pretty, it has limitations, but it might accomplish what you are trying to do.
Edit for Tableau Server consideration:
Tableau Server seems to generate .csv files for both "Data" and "Crosstab" download options. This is contrasted by Tableau Desktop generating a .xlsx file for the "Crosstab" option. This could be a bug or a known limitation of Tableau Server creating .xlsx files.
As a workaround, since the Acquirer Reference Number is a most likely a dimension (ie: not having math performed on it,) a calculated field like this could be created and resulting string explained to users (or inherently understood by them):
"AR:" + STR([Acquirer Reference Number])
Turns 24692168345100558990040 into AR:24692168345100558990040
I have verified that the output looks okay in exporting from Tableau Server to Excel. The leading letter(s) cause Excel to recognize the field as text instead of a number.

Excel 365 - Open csv files automatically (list separator solution not working)

If I opened a csv file, Excel used to automatically format it into columns. At some point in the past Excel just stopped doing this.
I'm using Office 365 Business, Excel version 1803. Windows 10 ver 1709
I want to be able to double click on a csv file and have it open automatically formatted into columns.
This is not machine specific as my coworker has an identical issue on a different brand of computer.
So far I have tried the following:
Changing the list separator: I cannot find the list separator setting in office 365, I think it may have been buried or removed.
The "decimal separator" is a comma.
Creating a simple csv to test with. I tested with this csv and it still has the same problem:
Date,Count
2018-01-02,22
2018-01-03,24
I do know I can use text to columns and write macros to accomplish this. I want to avoid those if possible so I can just open a csv and it's formatted.
Thanks, any insights here would be great. I am really hoping it is some system or excel setting.
I came across this and I hope that 1 year and 10 months later it will still help somebody.
Had the same problem and solved it by "Change date, time or number formats" in the Control Panel.
Standard the Format is "Match Windows display language"
My Windows is in English (list separator = ",") but I live in Belgium where the list separator is ";"
So in formats, I changed the Format to "Dutch (Belgium)". That solved it for me.
Once you change your country, double-check in "Additional Settings" if the separator is what you want. Keep in mind that also other things might change, such as decimal symbol and digit grouping symbol.
If you don't want that, you might only want to change the separator and don't change the country.
Best regards,
Koen

When saving a CSV in Excel 2016, can you change which delimiter it uses without changing your regional settings?

If you Google how to save a CSV with a delimiter other than a comma, you often get results like these:
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
I've used this method before and it works, but it screws up other things on my computer that rely on these regional settings. Is there something in Excel 2016 (or other versions) that lets me choose the delimiter without changing the regional settings?

SSRS date format in Excel with localization

I'm trying to export a SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services report to Excel. The report has a column of dates. The date is stored as a datetime in the SQL server.
The language of the report is set to =User!Language, the format of the date-cell is d.
When exporting/rendering the report to PDF, everything is displayed in the locale of the request made by the browser (Accept-Language).
When rendering to Excel however, the format suddenly changes, for example, to General ([$-10409]M.T.JJJJ) (German Excel, locale of the OS set to de-AT, browser-locale is en-US).
This means that the Excel displays dates in a completely wrong format - the sequence of day, month and year is hardcoded and only the separator comes from the current locale. This makes sharing reports between different OS languages almost impossible since a report generated from a d-m-yyyy country will still display as day-month-year in a country with different date formatting (and vice versa). So any person expecting a m/d/yyyy formatted date will get d/m/yyyy.
This is especially dangerous if there are no dates with days above 12 - ie: it is very likely to misread the displayed date because there is no obvious error.
When manually setting the cell-format in Excel to date, everything seems fine and the format changes with the locale of the OS.
Is there any possibility to force the cell to be formatted as Date in Excel without having to edit the Excel file itself?
P.S: numbers are also not formatted as a number but as [$-10409]#.##0,00;-#.##0,00 - which is less of an issue but still potentially a source of errors. (format in the report is N2)
I've manages to solve similiar issue. Solution is rather simple.
In report editor, open Design view and select field, which you want to edit, right mouse click and choosee either Expression or Textbox properties. The rest is very intuitive as in Excel editor.

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