Win XP, Excel 2007
I know there are various other posts on csv formatting but couldn't quite find what i needed.
Some of our data is held off site by another company and they send us a csv file every morning with the previous days data.
The problem is this data has come from web input forms that may have drop-down lists.
For example there may be a drop down list of Number of Employees with options like 1-10, 11-25, 26-50 etc
When we open the csv file in Excel certain options like 1-10 has been turned into Oct-01 date format which we do not want.
Is there an easy way to change these back OR reformat the cells and do a find...replace? (This didn't seem to work terribly well as it kept reverting back to the date)
Indeed is there a better way of opening the csv file to keep the formatting intact? and save us doing lots of find...replaces.
Ultimately we will need to open the csv in Excel though.
Grateful for any hints
Isn't that SO annoying? Here's how I deal with this issue:
When you open the CSV file in Excel, you should get a dialog with parsing options. First you select delimited or fixed then you get a screen that previews the data parsing.
It's easy to miss, but in the upper right corner of the dialog box there's an option to set a specific data format for each column. Select the column you want to protect and set the format to text. (This keeps Excel from dropping the leading zeros in ZIP codes for New England too!)
Once you get it into Excel, you can do a vlookup or replace to reset the values to your own codes.
Hope this helps. Good luck.
Related
desperate newbie here. I have a question for which I just cannot find the right solution. I received a dta file from which I want to extract the sub-headers of each column. Unfortunately, I am not versed in Stata or have access to it. I read my dta file into R and changed it to a data frame and also data table. It displays the column names and sub-headers well. However I cannot extract the sub-headers and they also disappear when I save the data frame or table as a csv or excel file locally. When I call colnames(df) or names(df), I only receive the column names and not the sub-headers. I also tried it with python without luck. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to share the data. So I hope my problem is understandable without an example. Thank you in advance!
I am a bit disgusted to get stuck on this, but I am.
I have Test Rail, and I have a csv file, from which I import test cases. A line in the csv file would something like this
blah,06/01/2020,blah,blah
The Date field isn't liked
A date value does not match the specified date format (column 2: "06/01/2021")
Date format shown in TestRail's importer is
MM/dd/yyyy
I just don't get what's wrong. I mean, don't my formats match up? Well I guess they don't.
Well I found out the answer eventually. It was to do with the input file format, an excellent source for little quirks.
Having tried two values for the File Encoding field
Windows-1252(Latin) Excel Default
UTF-8
For which the Date was not validated, I checked in notepad++ for the actual file encoding. There is an Encoding option in the top level window menu list there. From that I switched to using
UCS-2LE
From that point, everything worked.
The motto of the story then seems to be that TestRail has a lot of options in the File Encoding dropdown menu because it needs to have a lot of options - it's not forgiving.
I'm pasting Tab Delimited data from Notepad++ to excel (about 50k rows and 3 columns). No matter how many different ways I try it, Excel wants to convert a cell containing one " to the next instance of " into one cell content.
For Example, if my data looked like this:
"Apple 1.0 Store
Banana 1.3 Store
"Cherry" 2.5 Garden
Watermelon 4.0 Field
The excel file looks like this:
Apple1.0StoreBanana1.3Store
Cherry 2.5GardenWatermelon4.0Field
One way to get around this is to open the file as a CSV in excel, however this leads to Excel formatting the number values to simplified ones using Excel's "General" format. So the data would look like the following:
"Apple 1 Store
Banana 1.3 Store
"Cherry" 2.5 Garden
Watermelon 4 Field
The data I'm getting is coming from SQL Server Studio so my options for file formats are:
.CSV
.Txt (Tab-delimited)
Copy Pasting from Query results
The solution I'm looking for is to have the data represented in Excel with no excel processing taking place on the quotations, numbers or any other cell contents.
Don't open the file directly in excel. Instead import it and control the data types and file layout.
Open a new excel document:
Select Data menu:
Select From Text in get External Data section.
Select file to import
On step 1 of import wizard select delimited
Click next
Select tab checkbox and change text qualifier to {none}.
Click next
Set column data types to general, text, text
Click finish.
Excel auto imports the data the best it can when you open directly in excel. You lose flexibility/control when this happens. better to import and control yourself to get the fine adjustments you're looking for.
You end up with something like this:
By treating the numbers like text, the zero's don't get messed up.
By setting the text qualifier to none, the quotes don't get messed up.
Have you tried opening it via Text Import?
Got to Data tab > From Text (third form left on default)
You will have window similar to Text To Columns.
Select correct delimiter, remember to remove the quote sign from TExt Qualifier and mark all columns as text to avoid Excel autoformatting.
Step 1:
Step 2:
Step 3:
EXCEL TIP: TIME SAVING IN IMPORTING CSV FILES INTO EXCEL: If u pre-set your Text-To-Columns delimiter parameters correctly in EXCEL (eg specify tabs as the delimiter) and then copy and paste the CSV data, Excel will import the CSV paste directly into the correct columns without u having to going through the Text-To-Columns rigmarole. This was particularly time saving when i had to import hundreds of bank statements into Excel.
However if your Text-To-Columns delimiters are pre-specified incorrectly as e.g. comma and you are importing tab delimited files then excel will dump all the data into one column, and u will have to go through the time consuming process of converting Text-To-Columns for each statement.
EXCEL LOOKS TO THE EXISTING Text-To-Columns delimiters TO SEE IF IT CAN USE THOSE TO MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER WHEN PASTING DATA
Hope that tip helps (It saved me several hours)
Normally I work with Comma Delimited CSV files, and whenever I need to scan over the data, I just open it up in Excel, and there it is, organised neatly into columns.
However, on this occasion I have been given a tab delimited text file. If I open it up in MS Notepad, because the values and headings are all variable and different widths, the data is very disjointed. Easy for a computer to read. Not easy for me to read!
So far I have tried Notepad, Excel and Sublime Text.
Is there a program that will display a tab delimited text file, organised into humanly readable columns?
Thanks
I hope notepad++ can help you here.
Please try:
http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
OK, so it just required a few tweaks in Excel for it to format correctly.
I first changed the file extension from .txt to .csv and followed this guide:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-convert-delimited-text-files-into-excel-spreadsheets/
In short:
Open the file in MS Excel.
Highlight the first column (which is where all your data will be)
Select the Data tab in the File menu.
Select Text to Columns and follow the Wizard
I have an SSIS package using a tab delimited flat file source with a TON of fields. Recently the provider of the tab delimited flat file has decided to change the format of the flat file by sprinkling a couple dozen new fields at random into the file. Needless to say, this hosed the package.
Rather than rebuild another flat file source and redefine all the fields, types, and lengths all over again, is there a way to reorder the fields in the flat file source? Sure would have been nice if Microsoft allowed you to move the fields around in the Advanced Columns pane, but noooooo.
Any help is appreciated.
If you only need to add columns to your file, you can do that in the Flat File connection editor. In the advanced window, you can select the field next to the new one and click the chevron next to the New button. It will give you the choice insert before or insert after.
If you truly have to move things around, you'll need to edit the XML source. If you use the existing file definition as a guide, you can build the new one in Excel or T-SQL relatively easily. Easier than typing everything in all over again at least.
I had a similar issue: I needed to change the order of columns in my flat file destination. The time-saving approach I settled on:
Delete the FF destination and FF connection manager (note down file name/location!),
Clear the check boxes that enable output columns in the source component
Re-enable the columns in the order you want
Add a new FF destination and FF connection right from the FF destination's connection manager drop-down.
Review/sanity check column sizes in FF connection, as usual
Not a direct answer to the question, but I came here looking for advice on "how to rearrange flat file destination columns", perhaps this will help someone.
I haven't seen an solution for that problem. SSIS isn't very strong in changing metadata. You could try to do it in notepad, but that is very tricky and very buggy. I would not recommand that to you.
In the connection managers below of your IDE you can double click your file name and edit everything you want.
This is still a "feature" of SSIS. To work around this I create a flat file connection called "NULL" with a single column named "NULL". Use the "New" button to add the column. I change the default column name from "Column 0" to "NULL". This column name must not match any column name in the list to be re-populated. If you have a real column named "NULL", pick something else for the column name that's not in use. You can keep the "NULL" flat file connection in the project for later use. (I expect to need it a few more times in this project.)
For this example, I use a flat file destination. Change the Flat File Destination to use the NULL connection.
Check the mapping to see there are no columns mapped. Saving this resets the metadata stored for the mapping.
Finally, change the Flat File Destination back to the correct connection to get a new mapping without metadata interference.
My example is a flat file destination. It should work for a flat file source for resetting the metadata. It is similar to the trick of changing a query to "select 1 as [NULL]" and back to purge metadata when using a ODBC source or such.
you could probably try something, but i havent tested.. use expressions to set everything for your flat file source? turn design time validation off