On 2015-07-30 11:12 PM, Sylvain Pointeau wrote: > Le jeudi 30 juillet 2015, Simon Slavin <slavins at bigfraud.org> a ?crit : > >> Yes, as I wrote, this bad behaviour (which you could reasonably call a >> bug) is documented. That's how Microsoft wrote Excel and that's the way >> they want it to work, and that's how it will continue to work. >> >> Simon. >> > There is a workaround for the leading 0, but you cannot have multi-line > when doing this. It is one or the other, too bad! I though generating xml > for excel instead of csv, but I didn't have time to try yet.
Something I like to point out to clients everywhere: Excel is intended (much like Calc etc.) to be a financial spreadsheet system, NOT a data-manipulation tool. Its Row/Column/Cell backbone simply lends well to the latter and so people press it into service - but that wasn't the design goal. On that note, if you output things to Excel in CSV (or TSV formats) and you have columns suffering leading zero text, you can simply Prepend an Equals sign. i.e. if this is your CSV: ID, Name, Age "00017", John, 14 "10044", Joan, 17 "00038", James, 16 Which will import wrong losing leading zeroes, then change it to this: ID, Name, Age ="00017", John, 14 ="10044", Joan, 17 ="00038", James, 16 and Excel will behave perfectly well without any added weird characters or the like.
