Yes, even at Purple Frog Systems we use Excel!
Excel is great for that quick and dirty analysis, but there is nothing worse than opening a CSV file directly with Excel and finding out you’ve lost all of your leading zeros.
Take a look at my Sales.csv file
Viewed as a CSV in Notepad++ it looks as it should…
However viewed directly using Excel…
It now looks like I’ve got a sales quantity of 62 for product id 5!
To solve this :
- Open a new Excel Workbook
- Click “Data” Tab In Excel Ribbon
- Click “From Text/CSV”
- Select your required CSV file from your File Explorer & Click “Import”
- Click “Transform Data”
- Remove “Changed Type” in Applied Steps
- Click “Close and Load”
Problem solved!
I hope you find this blog useful…let me know in the comments if you’ve got any other quick Excel tips and tricks for data users!
