2 ms·
It is the best, but also the very very worst in so many ways. There are all sorts of data that are nearly impossible to get into Excel because of the ways that
by epistasis 1y ago
It is the best, but also the very very worst in so many ways.
There are all sorts of data that are nearly impossible to get into Excel because of the ways that it tries to turn everything into a date. There has been so much silent data corruption because of random misfeatures that were added decades ago and now they will never back out of the system. The string OCT4 amongst a column of alphanumeric identifiers will get changed into a date, silently, on import, and it's nigh on impossible to find out how to import without that silent conversion. It's better to write your own Python code to get data into Excel than to use its built in foot guns.
- countmora 1y agoIf you import with PowerQuery you can explicitly specify the data type for each column.
- NetMageSCW 1y agoThat can be turned off (easily Googled), or as mentioned, doesn’t affect proper import using Power Query. Also, if you control the data format and know Excel is the intended target, you can just output your CSV so Excel won’t do that (put =“ and “ around text columns). For any spreadsheet which are updated by refreshing source data such as CSV output from other systems, PowerQuery is what should be used and is very effective.
- epistasis 1y agoWhat are the web search terms you use to find to turn this off? Most people have not been able to figure this out, with the help of the web or in the application itself. The typical windows user is not going to be accomplish a successful import, except maybe by whatever the heck PowerQuery is.
- IAmBroom 1y agoI just tried an import of a CSV file containing "OCT4" in a line by itself, and Excel asked me if I wanted to convert it. I clicked "No", and it imported without conversion.