Pasting text and unwanted custom format

[Guest]

Morning all,
I have three columns of data from a ms access database and I am trying to
paste them into an excel spreadsheet to do a VLOOKUP function. There are
about 30000 records and I need to provide the storage locations of certain
gauges of about a 1000. the table below is an example of the data

Col A Column B Column C
Gage ID Status Storage Location
G123456/1 1 B1 - 3
G56789/2 4 A9-9


Cols A and B paste in no problem however col C does not; I have formatted
the destination column as general and some of the entries go in fine but some
seem determined to have a custom format of B2dd-mmm it looks very strange Eg
03 - then lots of sort of Arabic / Thai writing I am assuming it is a sort of
date format?
Any ideas on what I am doing wrong which I probably am as the caffeine
hasn't kicked in yet!
Many thanx
Ajay

 

[Jim Rech]

You might try exporting the data to a text file from Access, perhaps as a
CSV. Then change the extension to anything else (because Excel
automatically parses a CSV file). Then do a File, Open in Excel which will
cause the Text Import Wizard to start. With that you can indicate that the
file is comma delimited and, most importantly, that the format of the third
field should be Text, not General.

That should get the data into a new sheet correctly, after which you can
copy it to your workbook.

--
Jim Rech
Excel MVP
| Morning all,
| I have three columns of data from a ms access database and I am trying to
| paste them into an excel spreadsheet to do a VLOOKUP function. There are
| about 30000 records and I need to provide the storage locations of certain
| gauges of about a 1000. the table below is an example of the data
|
| Col A Column B Column C
| Gage ID Status Storage Location
| G123456/1 1 B1 - 3
| G56789/2 4 A9-9
|
|
| Cols A and B paste in no problem however col C does not; I have formatted
| the destination column as general and some of the entries go in fine but
some
| seem determined to have a custom format of B2dd-mmm it looks very strange
Eg
| 03 - then lots of sort of Arabic / Thai writing I am assuming it is a sort
of
| date format?
| Any ideas on what I am doing wrong which I probably am as the caffeine
| hasn't kicked in yet!
| Many thanx
| Ajay
|
|

 

[Guest]

Thanks Jim will give it a try
Ajay