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#1
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Apostrophe in cell
Hey Everyone...
I have a question for the group. In my work, I am responsible for uploading data about a professionals continuing education record. There are several ways that I can do this, but one of the more fundamental ways, is by using a spreadsheet. In this spreadsheet we have columns that you would typically find. First Name, Last Name, Certification #, DOB, Course #, Class #, etc. Each row in my spreadsheet represents one individual piece of coned for one practitioner. I dont want to burdeon you with too many details, so I cut to my question now. On fields, that are representative of numbers, dates, or codes (course #'s and class #'s), I must precede my data with an apostrophe ' . On a blank spreadsheet, the cells have absolutely no formatting whatsoever. This makes data entry inefficient and time consuming. But everytime I try and format the cells, to include an apostrophe as the first character, the spreadsheet will not upload properly. What does an apostrophe do? For a more detailed explanation of my process continue reading. I will give you a hypothetical scenario. You hold a continuing educaiton class. 10 people attend this class. For all ten people, each person has the following attributes: First Name Last Name DOB (mm/dd/yyyy) Certificaiton # (6 digits with some preceding 0's) Regional Code (2 digits with some preceding 0's) Course # (6 digits with some preceding 0's) Class # (6 digits with some preceiding 0's) County # (2 digits with some preceding 0's) Date of Class (mm/dd/yyyy) Over the years, we have refined the reporting process to automate some of these functions. However, there are occasions when hand entering this information is necessary. An example would be, if you travel to another state, take a ConEd class there, and would like to come back to your home and have that CE Class applied to your practitioner profile here. And since we operate on a yearly basis, everyone saves up their last minute coned, for, you guessed it, December 31st. When we put information into the spreadsheet, we save it conventionally. We then use a program that "pushes" that data to the states database. It then records the coned on the practitioenrs profile. Unfortunately, I do not have many details on where that data goes. I'm only guessing here that its a SQL Server database. And since there are about 18 different organizations that push this data, and some are more reponsible than others, details are difficult to come by. If I was able to automate the data entry process a little bit, by formating these fields to only accept entries that conformed to rules, that I can write, then the process would be launched forward. Anyone have any thoughts? Chip |
#2
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Apostrophe in cell
The apostrophe make the value behave as text rather than number.
Times when this is necessary include: 1) an entry with more than 15 digits. Enter 1234567890123456789 and Excel will round it to 15 digits and display it in scientific notation. Enter it with '123..... and it is text 2) an entry what Excel might mistakenly treat as a date. Enter 4/5 and Excel will give you a date but '4/5 is text. If you want four fifths then enter 0 4/5 3) to preserve a leading zero; but this can be done another way with a custom number format Hope this helps - my last 2008 contribution Happy New Year -- Bernard V Liengme Microsoft Excel MVP http://people.stfx.ca/bliengme remove caps from email "Chip" wrote in message ... Hey Everyone... I have a question for the group. In my work, I am responsible for uploading data about a professionals continuing education record. There are several ways that I can do this, but one of the more fundamental ways, is by using a spreadsheet. In this spreadsheet we have columns that you would typically find. First Name, Last Name, Certification #, DOB, Course #, Class #, etc. Each row in my spreadsheet represents one individual piece of coned for one practitioner. I dont want to burdeon you with too many details, so I cut to my question now. On fields, that are representative of numbers, dates, or codes (course #'s and class #'s), I must precede my data with an apostrophe ' . On a blank spreadsheet, the cells have absolutely no formatting whatsoever. This makes data entry inefficient and time consuming. But everytime I try and format the cells, to include an apostrophe as the first character, the spreadsheet will not upload properly. What does an apostrophe do? For a more detailed explanation of my process continue reading. I will give you a hypothetical scenario. You hold a continuing educaiton class. 10 people attend this class. For all ten people, each person has the following attributes: First Name Last Name DOB (mm/dd/yyyy) Certificaiton # (6 digits with some preceding 0's) Regional Code (2 digits with some preceding 0's) Course # (6 digits with some preceding 0's) Class # (6 digits with some preceiding 0's) County # (2 digits with some preceding 0's) Date of Class (mm/dd/yyyy) Over the years, we have refined the reporting process to automate some of these functions. However, there are occasions when hand entering this information is necessary. An example would be, if you travel to another state, take a ConEd class there, and would like to come back to your home and have that CE Class applied to your practitioner profile here. And since we operate on a yearly basis, everyone saves up their last minute coned, for, you guessed it, December 31st. When we put information into the spreadsheet, we save it conventionally. We then use a program that "pushes" that data to the states database. It then records the coned on the practitioenrs profile. Unfortunately, I do not have many details on where that data goes. I'm only guessing here that its a SQL Server database. And since there are about 18 different organizations that push this data, and some are more reponsible than others, details are difficult to come by. If I was able to automate the data entry process a little bit, by formating these fields to only accept entries that conformed to rules, that I can write, then the process would be launched forward. Anyone have any thoughts? Chip |
#3
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Apostrophe in cell
Well, I'm betting that my case is door #3. Where I need to preserve
the leading 0. Can someone show me an example of a custom number format for 6 digits, preserving the leading 0? I would think it would be 000000. Or is it ######? Thanks..! |
#4
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Apostrophe in cell
Why not try those 2 options and see what you get? It won't cost you
anything to try, and it will help you to learn. -- David Biddulph Chip wrote: Well, I'm betting that my case is door #3. Where I need to preserve the leading 0. Can someone show me an example of a custom number format for 6 digits, preserving the leading 0? I would think it would be 000000. Or is it ######? Thanks..! |
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