I would agree with you, except that in my case changing from the default to text kept the [rude adjective] barcode numbers in scientific notation. The barcodes I was trying to import into Koha didn't have any leading zeros, letters, or punctuation (I missed seeing those in the example)--they were just 14-digit numbers, each of which began with the same five numbers. And exporting from Horizon as a CSV file, massaging the data in a spreadsheet, then re-exporting using the Koha CSV import template was the easiest way to convert our database. For me, it worked. But YMMV. Fred King kohauser@phred.us
Op 16/07/13 14:48, Fred King schreef:
Right click on the top of the column Select "format cells" Choose "number" Change "decimal places" to 0.
Use text, don't use number. This is exactly what I'm talking about :) Barcodes aren't numbers, they're strings of characters with no particular semantics.
In particular, leading zeros and punctuation like '-' risk getting lost. Barcodes can even have letters in them, like the example provided does. I've also seen ISBNs turned into scientific notation because they were too big to be regular numbers. That caused headaches.
My fundamental belief is that spreadsheets tend to cause data loss unless you tread very carefully. This kind of thing is not what they're designed for, nor are they good at it (though they _seem_ that way.)
When working on migrations, the only reason a spreadsheet will touch my data is for browsing it, they are OK for getting rough summaries of what's in there, but they always corrupt something. So I never let them save anything.
It even can cause major economic downturns! http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/17/rogoff-reinhart-excel-errors/
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