Excel thinks it's a date

[Guest]

I'm outputting address info to Excel using cfcontent, where each address element is a separate cell ("123","MAIN", "ST"). Believe it or not there is a street called "1/2 Road", and Excel thinks "1/2" is a date (2-Jan) and displays it as such. I don't think it's a matter of applying a format to the cell as entering 1/2 in an Excel cell then formatting it as text returns something other than "1/2". If I enter '1/2 into an Excel cell it recognizes it as text but doing that in CF actually includes the ' as part of the string. The only workaround I've come up with is preceding the name with a space but I don't really want to have extra spaces that don't belong there.

Thanks,
Ken

[Guest · Accepted solution]

I experimented and found that applying a text format to the cell did solve the problem:
<td style="mso-number-format:\@; ">

Thanks,
Ken

[Newsgroup_User]

What about quotes on both sides?

Are you generating a CSV or an XSL file?


gr8white wrote:
> I'm outputting address info to Excel using cfcontent, where each address
> element is a separate cell ("123","MAIN", "ST"). Believe it or not there is a
> street called "1/2 Road", and Excel thinks "1/2" is a date (2-Jan) and displays
> it as such. I don't think it's a matter of applying a format to the cell as
> entering 1/2 in an Excel cell then formatting it as text returns something
> other than "1/2". If I enter '1/2 into an Excel cell it recognizes it as text
> but doing that in CF actually includes the ' as part of the string. The only
> workaround I've come up with is preceding the name with a space but I don't
> really want to have extra spaces that don't belong there.
>
> Thanks,
> Ken
>

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Don Vaillancourt
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[Guest]

I'm using cfcontent to generate Excel output inline - it's .XLS rather than .CSV.

If I use "1/2" it actually shows the quotes in the Excel cell which isn't what I want.

But as I said the css style did solve the problem.

Thanks for the input.

Ken