How to force a name to be taken as a name?

M

muhr

We are exporting tabular data in tab delimited format. Some names that
are exported may well begin with - +, can look like a number: +section
etc. During export all names are quoted, e.g., "+section". However,
when opened in Excel all such names are misinterpreted as formulas and
produce ridiculous results or #NAME cell errors.
My question: how can I tag data to be exported in such a way, that it
is
a) interpreted as plain text and
b) not being decorated with extra lead characters (') visible in the
resulting table.
c) not neccessary to do special Excel settings or other activities on
the users side when importing the data

Thanks!
- Thomas
 
P

Pete_UK

Why do you have names like "+section" ? You can get rid of the "+" in
the original file by highlighting the names column and then CTRL-H
(Find & Replace), to find + and replace it with nothing. Similarly for
other unnecessary characters.

Hope this helps.

Pete
 
H

hansyt

Hi Thomas,

If you select data-->get external data-->import textfile
select the file to import,
click import
select "delimited" (the default)
click next
check the kind of delimiter you have
click next
On the next screen Excel show all the field values in columns according
to the delimiter chosen.
Here you can click a field, select "text"
do that for all fields
click finish
click ok

That should do it.

Hans
 
T

Thomas

Hello Hans,
I was afraid that there seems to be now way of enforcing literal
interpretation at the creation time of the file and not when it is
processed by the user.
We create the delimited file in our application and the next thing the
user should see is Excel opening with the correctly interpreted file.
And of course, the + signs etc have some meaning so we cannot simply
get rid of them!-)

I found that inserting a space before each name does what we need,
however, a bit ugly with that extra indent.

Thanks
- Thomas
 
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