Re: [PHP] Spreadsheet_Excel_Reader problem

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 6:01 PM, Jason Pruim <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Mar 18, 2010, at 1:26 PM, Andrew Ballard wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 1:00 PM, Ashley Sheridan
>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> [snip]
>>>
>>> And I believe that when MS Office saves a CSV out with a character other
>>> than a comma as the delimiter, it still saves it as a .csv by default.
>>
>> Nope. If you save as CSV, it is comma-separated with double-quotes as
>> the text qualifier. There is also an option to save in tab-delimited
>> format, but the default extension for that is .txt.
>>
>> The only issue I have with Excel handling text files is with columns
>> like ZIP code that should be treated as text (they are string
>> sequences that happen to contain only numeric digits where leading
>> zeros are significant) but are interpreted as numbers.
>>
>> Andrew
>
>
> Hi Andrew,
>
> As a fellow mailing list processor I can feel your pain... One thing I have
> found is when you are importing the data, you can select the zip column and
> change the format from "general" to "text" and it will maintain the leading
> zero's. Or a simple filter applied to it afterwards will help to.
>
> But if you have a decent CASS software then it should add the zip back in
> hehe :)
>
>

That works - if I'm the first one to open the file. Often I get files
that someone else opened in Excel to "fix" some things then saved back
to CSV and sent merrily along.  :-)

Andrew