Importing Numeric fields from Excel appends .000 in Contacts

[Guest]

Hi, When I have imported into my contacts list from a list in Excel, my
phone number fields and postcode fields all have .000 appended to them in
contacts?

eg Phone number 12345678 in Excel file appears as 12345678.000 in Outlook
phone field.

How do I:
.. prevent the .000 being added when importing, OR
.. edit all records to remove the .000 after they are imported?

This happens when the Excel field is either numeric (with 0 decimal places)
or set to text.

Outlook 2000 and Excel 2000.

thanks
Karen

 

[Karl Timmermans]

Quick and easy solution to this is:

Save your worksheet in CSV format - import that CSV file.

We have seen this both "work" and "fail" with an Excel column being
formatted as text. We know "why" it happens(or fails - whatever your
perspective is on the matter) but not sure exactly what the triggers are
given the different versions of MDAC/Jet, Excel, Outlook (and any
combination of thereof).. For us, it became a waste of effort (effort being
loosely translated to equate to money) to try and figure it out so we
created a generic solution within our import products that eliminates this
issue. If the numeric phone # issue is your only problem - then we've found
that the above suggestion cures the issue 99.999% of the time using the
standard Outlook import wizard.

As an aside for othes reading this - US Zip codes in Excel worksheets can
also exhibit this behaviour.

Karl
--
__________________________________________
Karl Timmermans - The Claxton Group
ContactGenie - Importer 1.3 / DataPorter 2.0
"Power contact importers for MS Outlook '2000/2003"
http://www.contactgenie.com

 

[Guest]

Thanks very much - that does indeed solve the problem. By the way - it was
happening with my postcode field too - (although I am using Australian
postcode's - all numeric fields)