Hi Francis,
I’m using Excel 2013 which allows me to do all values in one go the way I had described, even if you have text in between integer columns. Excel is just not consistent with where it displays the context menu for converting numbers stored as text. When you select the entire range using the mouse (dragging a rectangle essentially) the context menu appears on the screen where the last bottom-right cell was selected. When using the keyboard (which is faster) the context menu only shows when scrolling back to the top-left corner of the selected range.
The important aspect is that the first cell selected has to be a number stored as text, otherwise it won’t work. That’s why CTRL+A or selecting columns or rows doesn’t work for converting numbers to text.
Tino
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On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 1:02 PM, Francis Vachon francisv...@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Tino,
Yes there are a couple workaround this. If I’m setting some sort of Excel analysis form, I also sometimes refer to the ranges with numbers stored as text as =INT(), which forces a conversion to integer (if that makes sense for that prompt of course).
My main concern is mostly about times when I won’t be handling the data myself, and may not even be in contact with those who will handle those data - of course one can pass along the instructions but depending on users…
Also the other problem with this is that with a long form, when you integer columns aren’t contiguous, you must do that for every block of integer - Excel (at least my version, but its 2013 so fairly recent) isn’t smart enough to let you do the whole thing at once, you must proceed block by block which is annoying…
Unless I missed something in Excel, there doesn’t seemed to be a way convert all those flags at once - the closest to it would be what you mentioned…
Francis
On Thursday, July 2, 2015 at 3:28:30 PM UTC-4, Francis Vachon wrote:
Hi there,
Just a quick question: is everyone getting the output files from Kobo, when XLS is choosen as output, the numbers stored as text (at least integer types)?
Of course in Excel it’s not hard to remedy, however when you have a large form and potentially not very technical users the options to deal with it aren’t great either. I really wish Excel would have some default way of converting all the errors it flags as suspcious text to numbers all at once.
One can also export as CSV, but then when opening in Excel empty values shows up as n/a instead of just blank cells. SO again no ideal options it seems to me, unless someone has found aquick & dirty fix?
Then you could use VBA, but having to deal with macro-enabled macros just for that seems like an overkill…
Francis
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