Excel gotcha

Just got bit by a... I can't call it "bug", but at least surprising behavior, in Excel 2007 (though I believe it is the same even in other versions).

I had a column of text (file names) in a csv document which was opened in Excel and re-saved as a regular Excel files. The recipient of that document asked me while some of the file names were in scientific notation :) It puzzled me for a bit, until I realized that a lot of the file names had the form 12E12345. When the part after the "E" was small enough (I didn't bother searching for the limit, but I'd make a wild guess and say below 300), Excel would interpret that string as a number in scientific notation - so 01E00212 became 1E+212.

The program I used to generate these csv documents knew to prefix strings made up of only digits and starting with zeroes with an apostrophe - like '00123. This one, however, caught me unprepared :)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Posting dynamic Master / Detail forms with Knockout

Image
I have the following dynamic form in my GitHub Inventory project : I created the form with KnockoutJS , using some ideas from this article . The detail view looks like this: <table id="acquisition_items" class="jtable"> <thead> <tr> <th>Product Name</th> <th>Quantity</th> <th>Price</th> <th>Value</th> <th><button data-bind="click: addItem">[+]</button></th> </tr> </thead> <tbody data-bind="foreach: items"> <tr> <td> <input data-bind="value: ProductName" type="text" value="" /> </td> <td> <input data-bind="value: Quantity" type="text" value="" /> </td> <td>
Read more

Comparing Excel files, take two

Image
I already wrote this project once, on GitHub , but I can't say that I like the result. I wrote that code without TDD, mostly to see if I can still work in the "normal" fashion. I can, but I had a bug that took me a while to even discover and then was difficult to write tests for. I also hate the temporal dependency in that design (if you don't call the SortBy method first, the ExcludeRecords method will return incorrect results). Anyway; here's attempt number two, writing that code using TDD. Structure I start by creating my usual structure for projects of this type - a library for the logic, a console application for the main program and a test project for tests. I also use the Enable NuGet Package Restore option (right-click on the solution node) to add the three NuGet files that will allow someone to automatically download all the packages I'm referencing without wasting space in the source code repository. (Right now I've only added the Moq pa
Read more

EF Code First: seeding with foreign keys

This is just a quick tip, more for future reference for myself than anything else. When using Entity Framework Code First, one of the things you might want to do while developing the application is to seed your database with some test data. This can be something as easy as: protected override void Seed(InventoryDB context) { context.Products.AddOrUpdate( p => p.Name, new Product { Name = "Hammer", SalePrice = 11.99m, }, new Product { Name = "Nail Pack x100", SalePrice = 0.05m, }, new Product { Name = "Saw", SalePrice = 19.99m, }, new Product { Name = "Toolkit", SalePrice = 39.99m, } ); //... } (I am using the AddOrUpdate method so the code detects whether those products already exist and doesn't add them again if they do.) The Product class is quite simple and – most importantly – doesn't depend on any other: public class Product { public int Id { g
Read more