Hello,
Yes you are correct that excel has an issue with number like 21E0000. I’ve also had a discussion with you in Apr. 2008 about this issue with the financial reported. Andrew help us create a template that would extract the department codes as text and then we would open the file in excel. Since the time you removed the option to export to dbf we have used the export to excel option without an issue. We have used this option using both Office 2003 and Office 2007.

Our month end process exports 4 or 5 exports of accounting info that we import to our Insurance System. From our Insurance System we export 7 or 8 files that we import in to the Ledger program. Once we had the templates set-up and working we had no issues.

Next we updated to version 9.0C of the ledger and ran our standard testing. This includes testing importing and exporting and this worked. (but I did notice the report issue with the billion dollar batches losing the first number did return). I next applied the 100511 service pack to Ledger and while I noticed the billion dollar issue was resolved, I may not have looked far enough down to locate the excel numbering issue. I’m sure it was not there after applying 9.0C.

The work around I preformed yesterday to get a proper set of data in to excel was the following:

1. From Financial Reporter | opened the above smart sheet template.
2. Edited it to capture the required data.
3. Did the Excel Direct.
4. Once completed and the data was opened in excel 2003, I reformatted the negative number from (11100.00) to -11100.00
5. Since we have over 30,000 accounts (this is a requirement in property insurance), I cut rows 16,000 to 31,500 to and pasted in to a new excel file.
6. I then saved both excel files in to version 5.0 or Excel 95 and this saved and read the department codes correctly.
7. I closed and reopened both spreadsheet in excel 2007 was able to combined these two files in to one and save and excel keep the correct number formats.


Today tried the following:
1. Did an export to csv.
2. Opened in notepad.
3. Closed and opened in excel 2007
4. Did the cvs import and set the department code to text.
5. Everything looks fine, save the file into excel 2003 format.
6. We then run a foxpro program on the file and receive an error “file is not a recognised Microsoft excel file”
7. If I perform steps 5 to 7 from above ie saving to excel 95 then the foxpro can read the file.

I seem to recall reading or speaking to someone who told me that you used excel 2.0 (maybe 4.0) because that was the most readable spreadsheet and why you were using the earlier version in your import/export function.

So to recap:
Import issues:
For the new version of ledger we had to change the date formats and found that the new version does not read the excel file in the same way before a file that showed a value but actually contained a link to another spreadsheet which imported correctly on April Month end but failed after the 9.0C and the service pack were installed.

Exporting:
Foxpro no longer can read a file exported to excel and some department codes being read as scientific exponential.

If I had a dollar to wager I would say something in the import/export of adagio has changed. Was the version of excel you use upgraded?

For Andrew:
When I open export and highlight the department code, it is set to string and will not let me change it even if I log on as the sys account.