Solution to the 'leading zero' problem using csv. Thank you, Gar y Murphy.

[James Womeldorf <jwomeldo@FASTENAL.COM>]

Curiosity got the best of me after reading Gary's message so I tried placing

="0123"

in a text file named test.csv.  Then I clicked on the filename.
What a surprise!  0123 appeared in cell A1.

I formatted a different cell as text and put 0123 in it, and although they
appear differently on the edit line, they compared as being equal.



Then I tried

="0123"
1,2,=a2+b2

and the formula a2+b2 appeared in cell C3!

Thank you Gary for introducing me to this technique in csv.

Jim Womeldorf


-----Original Message-----
From: James Womeldorf
Sent: Monday, May 14, 2001 12:00 PM
To: SQR-USERS@list.iex.net
Subject: Re: CSV Field Width


I am curious as to what you are referring to regarding (="xx") to avoid
truncating left most zeroes.
"0123",0123
both come into Excel 2000 as 123.

I do not believe you can control any formatting from a csv file including
the cell width.   I am quite certain that Excel defaults to 9 numeric
characters wide.


Jim Womeldorf
Programmer/Analyst
Fastenal Company
jwomeldo@fastenal.com
(507) 453-8250


-----Original Message-----
From: Gary Murphy [mailto:gmurphy@CSULB.EDU]
Sent: Monday, May 14, 2001 11:42 AM
To: SQR-USERS@list.iex.net
Subject: CSV Field Width


Does anyone know how to control the field width of a CSV file that is
created from SQR when it is opened in Excel?  I am using the (="xx") to
avoid truncation of the left most zeroes.  It appears to be defaulting to 9
characters when opened in Excel.

Thanks