Forum Discussion

MikeTamoush's avatar
MikeTamoush
Qrew Commander
2 years ago

Quickbase Text field downloads in numeric format to CSV?

Does anyone have a work around for the following?

I have a table with Parcel Numbers. They can be quite long, something like 06545500006452300.

I have this in a text field. When downloaded to a CSV, it will show as 0654550E+12. Essentially, trying to turn it into a number which excel can't handle. Anyone run into this, and have a good work around?



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Mike Tamoush
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  • The only solution I know if is to have a formula to prepoernd a prefix like  

    *06545500006452300.

    That will cause the export to be seen as a text field type by Excel

    Then you will need to strip that prefix * out in Excel with a formula.



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    Mark Shnier (Your Quickbase Coach)
    mark.shnier@gmail.com
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    • MikeTamoush's avatar
      MikeTamoush
      Qrew Commander

      Thanks Mark. I also found this in a post by Evan martinez. It worked, and is a good enough solution for now.

      "Open the file using Excel's Text Import Wizard. In Excel 2007, click on the Data tab and then click on "From Text" under "Get External Data". In earlier versions of Excel, open the Data menu then click on Import External Data > Import Data... Select your CSV file in the resulting file dialog, which will bring the Text Import Wizard. Select a "delimited" data type and then select "comma" as the delimiter. You will then have the opportunity to specify the type of each column. To correct the lost leading zero problem, select "text" as the type of your zip code field. Unfortunately, this solution will not work if cells in your export contain multi-line data."



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      Mike Tamoush
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      • MarkShnier__You's avatar
        MarkShnier__You
        Icon for Qrew Legend rankQrew Legend

        OK, yes it's a case of choosing your poison. This could work for you if you are personally the one doing it but if you were trying to have a bunch of other users trying to do this that would lead to a training problem.  



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        Mark Shnier (Your Quickbase Coach)
        mark.shnier@gmail.com
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