Export to excel - formatting problem

[Patrick Boyd]

Hi,

We've some code that spits out an html table from our application and opens
it within excel. One of our clients has recently been having a problem with
date formats (operations in different regions of the world).

We changed our code to output all the dates in the format dd mmm yyyy (e.g.
31 Mar 2006), they've come back with a problem that our report is fine for
the first couple of hundred lines in excel, the date columns are correctly
formatted as dates, but after that line, all the date formatting is lost, and
just displayed as 'text'. It's also impossible to change the cell format back
to date...

(the line the format is lost on has identical dates in many cases to the
previous line...)

Anybody ever seen anything like this? I'm stumped...

 

[JE McGimpsey]

We've some code that spits out an html table from our application and opens
it within excel. One of our clients has recently been having a problem with
date formats (operations in different regions of the world).

We changed our code to output all the dates in the format dd mmm yyyy (e.g.
31 Mar 2006), they've come back with a problem that our report is fine for
the first couple of hundred lines in excel, the date columns are correctly
formatted as dates, but after that line, all the date formatting is lost, and
just displayed as 'text'. It's also impossible to change the cell format back
to date...

(the line the format is lost on has identical dates in many cases to the
previous line...)

Anybody ever seen anything like this? I'm stumped...

Are your clients using XL2004?

Are the dates in one column or spread throughout the table?

Any chance your app is using non-breaking spaces to position the dates
within the table?

Is it a consistent line where things go wonky, or is it variable?

FWIW, I've never seen this particular problem.

 

[Patrick Boyd]

Are your clients using XL2004?

2003, SP2

Are the dates in one column or spread throughout the table?

Throughout the table.

Any chance your app is using non-breaking spaces to position the dates
within the table?

Not as far as i can see, it's just td date /td

Is it a consistent line where things go wonky, or is it variable?

We only have one instance of this problem reported, and we can't recreate
it, so it's kinda hard to say.

Thanks for the help

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Are your clients using XL2004?

2003, SP2[/QUOTE]

Ah. You're posting in MacXL newsgroup. You might have more luck posting
in a non-Mac group, say

microsoft.public.excel.misc

 

[Patrick Boyd]

Aha, i see... thanks )

(probably 'just works' on a mac too...)

 

[JE McGimpsey]

(probably 'just works' on a mac too...)

While it's tempting to say "of course", reading HTML has never been XL's
strong point on either platform.