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Author Topic: Ugh THIS is why I hate Excel....  (Read 927 times)

Morrokain

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Ugh THIS is why I hate Excel....
« on: June 17, 2020, 03:56:59 PM »

Arrrgh!  >:(

My ship_data.csv and weapon_data.csv files are now completely broken in the "tags" column for the Open Office csv editor because my dumb butt saved it in Excel Ex-smell (like hot garbage) for a tiny change to a completely different cell. Apparently that makes the quotes unable to be read as a cell wrapper for Open Office. *Curses under breath*

It's not a big deal for now because I still can use Excel or Google Sheets, but if I get a new computer I will have to buy Microsoft Office again or stick with Google Sheets and it's not exactly cheap. This stuff annoys me so much. Any quote enclosed cells are finicky-er than my cat in that program's format... sigh. I even tried re-saving it as a .csv with google sheets and nope its just permanently broken in Open Office now unless I manually change it. I will say I'm pretty unfamiliar with Google Sheets so that could be the problem. I'm probably going to permanently switch to that and learn it now though.

People... just use Google Sheets it will save you a large headache though it requires internet access (I don't always have that while camping and sometimes do late-night work by the fire with my gfs labtop). It's at least free instead of forcing a format that you will have to constantly pay for in the future.

Proof:

Spoiler
Notepad:



Excel:



Open Office:


[close]
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Morrokain

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Re: Ugh THIS is why I hate Excel....
« Reply #2 on: June 17, 2020, 04:25:09 PM »

Shot in the dark, have you tried C+P from Excel to Libre/Open?

I haven't no. I'll check it out thanks!
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Thaago

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Re: Ugh THIS is why I hate Excel....
« Reply #3 on: June 17, 2020, 06:28:32 PM »

Huh, I've used excel for a long time and never had any issues. Its... weird that open office can't read the file - that tells me that excel saved in the wrong CSV format. Perhaps check your delimiter settings? Quotations for instance? It shouldn't be adding any metacharacters or metadata to a csv save.
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Histidine

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Re: Ugh THIS is why I hate Excel....
« Reply #4 on: June 17, 2020, 07:05:41 PM »

This looks like you need to set your OpenOffice string delimiter to double quotes (") when opening the file.
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Morrokain

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Re: Ugh THIS is why I hate Excel....
« Reply #5 on: June 17, 2020, 08:10:50 PM »

Hmm, ok I'll try it thanks for the advice! But if that was the case, why aren't there double quotes when opening the file in notepad?? Hidden I guess? But Thaago seemed to think otherwise. At the very least that's not very intuitive if so.

Also Google Sheets says it's in .csv format not .xls format.

*Edit* Oh wait, do you mean "double quotes" as in (") instead of (')? When I think of double quotes I think of (""). (') I think of as an apostrophe.

*Edit 2* Ah yep! That was the problem. I feel silly now haha. I didn't catch that the string delimiter was ('). It is kind of weird to me that I was using (") in notepad originally, and that was fine in Open Office and read correctly even when the string delimiter was ('). It was only after opening that same file in Excel and saving it that Open Office no longer read it correctly.

Ah well, hopefully this will help someone going through the same problem at least.
« Last Edit: June 17, 2020, 08:25:31 PM by Morrokain »
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