Excel is pretty awful software.
10-15 years ago it was good, but it just isnât anymore.
Comment on Real Struggle đ
ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip â¨3⊠â¨days⊠ago
I recently had a hard time explaining to a coworker that the âIncrease number of decimalsâ button in Excel doesnât work if you already exported to a CSV with only a decimal of precision. It worked on their end because they had the excel file, but I had the CSV. I managed to come up with a clever and innovative solution to the problem though; I gave up and worked on something else.
Excel is pretty awful software.
10-15 years ago it was good, but it just isnât anymore.
Considering it is being saved in another format, Iâd hardly consider this an excel problem.
CSV has existed since before personal computers, much less Microsoft office.
Maybe, by why wouldnât Excel let uou increase the number of digits in a CSV? The data is currently in Excel, and more digits isnât incompatible with the CSV format.
Because itâs basically a text file. The data doesnât exist anymore once you open it as a CSV on another computer. Itâd basically just add zeros to the end.
They could probably get that info from the other file, but that would mean getting that person to give it to you again.
You canât increase the decimal precision beyond the limits of the available data which I think is what OPâs coworker wasnât understanding â unless Iâm the one who misunderstood.
The coworker rounded the numerical data during the conversion from xlsx to csv meaning there was less data in the exported csv than in the original Excel file. They seemed to think the data did still exist in the csv but it was being hidden and that they could simply change the precision to unhide it.
Thatâs actually pretty terrible. Can you load the csv and then save it again as an xls? Once itâs loaded, why does it care what the source format was?
I think you misunderstood the problem.
Is the problem that someone else is wrong and we want to relish in the agony of dealing with it?
As soon as you convert from an .XLS file to a .CSV file, the data and sig figs used to display that data are saved while the math formulas used to calculate that data are erased.
This means that when you try to go from .CSV to .XLS, Excel doesnât know the original formula that created the data to then be able to display more decimal points. The formula is absolutely necessary to change sig figs of displayed data.
The only other way I can think of that would allow one to change sig figs in .CSV data is if the .XLS file was converted with like the maximum number of sig figs displayed, or letâs say 10-20. Then in a .CSV, you can modify the sig figs to something less, like 0-20.
But I want to say that if you save that file, where you original converted it with 10-20 sig figs but then changed them to 0-20, the .CSV overwrites the data and you lose the sig figs that you concatenated.
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world â¨3⊠â¨days⊠ago
There ya go.
diabetic_porcupine@lemmy.world â¨3⊠â¨days⊠ago
Yeah sucks when heâs the only guy giving you tasks and what else are you going to do?