One suggestion, best suited to occasional use, is to fill the next column
(ie, the first column you dont want) with a data that you wont find as real
data (say $$4$$ )

You then have the choice of ignoring the last field in Oracle as you input,
or you can open the file in Notepad and replace ,"$$4$$" (that is replace
comma quote $$4$$ quote ) with nothing. This will give you the correct number
of field separators, but is rather time consuming, especially on a large file
and not a process you would wish to repeat often.

Trying to enter a comma as a cell value will, unfortunately, cause such
commas to be enclosed in quotes when output to a .csv file, this could cause
a problem as the comma then becomes part of your data.

Hopefully there is a better solution.

--

"RichardOKeefe" wrote:

I'm retrieving data from an Oracle database ino a CSV file so that it can be
manipulated in Excel, saved back to a CSV file and then imported back the
Oracle database. Part of the manipulation is to remove the last couple of
columns which are for display purposes only. The last column left after
deleting the display columns can have null values ie blank cells. My problem
is that when I save the file back to CSV format, rows that end in a blank
column sometimes end with a comma to denote the last blank or null column and
sometimes don't. The ones that are missing the trailing comma don't load
into Oracle properly. They do load into a table becasue Oracle recognises
trailing null columns but I'm loading the last several columns as one to
process them separately It is this process that is failing because rows that
are missing the trailing comma cause a mismatch with the expected number of
columns being loaded back in.

The first row of the CSV file is a set of headers that define the columns in
each row.

Is there some way of getting around this eg cell formatting?

Thanks in advance.