MSP 2010 Export to Excel Format Issues 1

[BobVitter]

Export to Excel worked ok for MSP 2007 but 2010 appears to export all data with an apostrophe as the first character so the fields are all text in Excel. This is a real problem for dates and numeric fields such as % Complete which can not be easily formatted in Excel when defined as a text field. Excel format does not work, the only way to format a cell is to manually remove the apostrophe.

 

[SkipVought]

hi,

In Excel, in an EMPTY CELL, Enter a
[tt]
1
[/tt]
that's the number one.

COPY that cell.

SELECT the DATA in the columns you want to convert from TEXT to NUMBERS (including DATE columns, assuming that your dates strings are structured d/m/yyyy or yyyy/mm/dd)

In the SELECTED DATA, RIGHT-click and select Edit > Paste Special -- Operation: MULTIPLY This will coerce the conversion.

Please note: if you have also selected EMPTY CELLS, each will contain 0 (numeric zero)

Skip,

_{Just traded in my old subtlety...
for a NUANCE!}

 

[JulieInMaine]

Hi Bob,

I'm not seeing this. I've exported from Project 2010 SP-1 and the dates appear as date/time. What export map are you selecting and what version of Excel?

 

[BobVitter]

Excel 2010 and I am using a custom map I created from scratch.

 

[SkipVought]

Bob,

Did you try my suggestion?

Skip,

_{Just traded in my old subtlety...
for a NUANCE!}

 

[SkipVought]

You could also try exporting as a .csv and then IMPORTING the .csv file into an existing Excel workbook.

Once you have your IMPORT QueryTable defined, specifying which fields are Text, Numeric and Date, this IMPORT can be accomplished, simply using the REFRESH method.

Skip,

_{Just traded in my old subtlety...
for a NUANCE!}

 

[JulieInMaine]

Hi Bob,
Sorry for the delay. Again, I am not seeing this with Project 2010 and SP-1 with Excel SP-1 installed.

Can you post the details of the custom map?

Julie

 

[BobVitter]

I tried exporting using a standard map "Default Task Information" and I get the same result, all numeric fields are formatted as text but is such a way that they can not be reformatted in Excel short of taking extra steps such as the one Skip recommended above.
The export map specifies the output data type as Text and I can not change that. The real issue is that the output fields have some special character (not an apostrophe) as the lead character so Excel will not reformat the cels.

 

[SkipVought]

output fields have some special character (not an apostrophe) as the lead character so Excel will not reformat the cels.

Please COPY & PASTE the data from one of these fields here, including the prepended value in question, for analysis purposes.

Skip,

_{Just traded in my old subtlety...
for a NUANCE!}

 

[BobVitter]

I attached the sample Excel spreadsheet

 

[JulieInMaine]

When looking at your spreadsheet, I see that the TaskID field is a number stored as text. I can't imagine you are attempting to use that field for calculation. The duration field and the predecessors field are text due to the text values in the field.

I was able to quickly convert the TaskID to numbers using the error checking option to convert the text to numbers.