> Actually I was suggesting storing these values as strings in the first > place > (when entering them in the spreadsheet the first time.) > > What wasn't clear from your original post was whether you were creating > data > to be read by Excel, or whether you were processing data created by Excel.
That's a good thing to consider for entering new data in the future. However, this was processing a series of existing files, each containing hundreds to thousands of entries, so I didn't want to be forced to change the formatting. > Keep in mind though that if you use numeric values, eventually you *will* > be > bitten by the precision bug, if the number has enough digits. The only > way > to be 100% sure that precision is being kept is by using integer values > (which I don't think Excel can even do... correct me if I'm wrong) or by > using strings. Plus you'll generally lose leading zeroes unless you use a > format like "000000000000" to work around that. I always found it much > easier to use actual string values when the values were IDs rather than > numeric values where maths was required. In this case I was able to get accuracy by simply getting the numeric values of the cells and casting them as (int). None of the codes started with 0 and none of them had .'s in them. But I'll be sure to keep that in mind if I need to process other types of data in the future. Thanks again, Andrew --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
