Excel 2003 Question

[dutchboy]

Situation is that when importing a file with a negative amount one pc will load it as -1. Three other pc's will load it as 000000001- which will not work.

Any ideas? Same OS and version of excel loaded.

Thanks for any help

[equicom]

Doest the same thing happen if you type -1 in a cell manually?

What type of file are you importing?

[dutchboy]

Doest the same thing happen if you type -1 in a cell manually?

What type of file are you importing?


It is a text file saved as an .xls worksheet. Typing -1 works fine. Downloading from a website and saving direct in to an excel worksheet does not.

Really wierd why the same file works fine on one pc but not 4 others.

[Dave Schwartz]

Try this...

Download the file from machine A and open it on machine B, and vice-versa.

This should tell you if it is a problem with downloading the file or the Excel part.

[dutchboy]

http://www.ozgrid.com/Excel/excel-imported-negative-numbers.htm

This may be the solution. Interesting reading even if it does not fix my problem.

[equicom]

Yeah, but your minus signs are in the correct position, right?

I don't expect this will make any difference, but if the text file is saved with extension ".txt", try renaming it to have extension ".csv"

It's worth a try, because it could be a parsing issue. But I don't really have a lot of faith that this solution will work.

It looks to me like Excel is converting the number to some weird floating point number. Maybe it will be as simple as selecting the errant column and changing the format to "General"

Worth a try.

Oh... and I almost forgot... since this issue is one PC vs 3, maybe the matter lies in the processor. If one is AMD and the others are Intel (or the other way around) then that could be the source of the problem, if not the solution.

[dutchboy]

Equicom,

The "-" is to the right of the numbers in the excel sheet. Instead of -1 it will import as 1- and excel will not include a number with the - on the right if you try to sum the coulmn. It also will not sum any dollar amounts correctly. I have tried the csv which did not work for me.

When you get a chance open the link 2 replies up and you will see an article about mirrored negatives and excel not even recognizing it as a number.

I tried the formula and it does work.

Guess I should not say it will not autosum. Excel will just ignore those cells so the totals are wrong.

[equicom]

OK, if you're happy then so am I. But we still don't know the reason why it worked on one PC but not on the other 3, when all were running the same software version and OS version, so it's kind of the Bermuda Triangle of computing for the moment. :)