Friggin EXCEL import gonna cost my job. . .

[yafreax]

well, that's a little extreme. . .

BUT i do a little drag and drop onto FM 5.0 from an excel files and it added 3 letters at the end of the last field to every record. . .

basically there are a few fields like first name, last name, dept, section, and Barcode Number. This barcode number is the most important one. I was importing this data into filemaker and changing the barcode to a barcode font. . . well that data when imported strictly through drag and drop, add the last 3 letters of the first name field to the end of the barcode field. . . and ofcourse, this makes for the wrong barcode. . . i'll be trying to contact filemaker and see what is up. . . anyone else know of this. . .can anyone else recreate it? ANY FRIGGIN' IDEA WHAT"S GOING ON?!?!?!?!

jeremy

[Arin]

No, not sure what's up with that, but I will say that Proverbs 14:15 is the Truth!!

For the time being couldn't you just write a script that loops and pulls the last three characters off?

[yafreax]

i ended up just pulling it straight out of excel which was just as much of a pain BECAUSE in excel when you export ("save as") to a .dbf file (which is what i needed) you have to widen the columns as wide as the widest entry per column is. . . in other words, it only exports the data that is seen so any data that is cut off by a neighbor column is reduced! HOW STUPID IS THAT?!?!?!

and b/c we have no clue as to why this is happening in filemaker, we (dont beat me here people) have started lookin into alternatives for these type of projects. . . i.e. - access , seeing as filemaker was my first and so far only DB programming, i have no idea what i'm doing in access and it comes with very little help. . . but i always find workarounds, i just have to figure this stuff out. . .

jeremy

[SteveB]

If you double click on the field separator at the top of each Excel column, Excel will widen the column to accomodate the longest text in the column.

[slstrother]

My guess is your barcode field contains an alpha-numeric string. This string is either calculated in Filmaker or is imported from Excel (you did not specify). You might try changing your field definition or calculation result to text. If that does not work, look at the barcode font you are using to make sure that it will display alpha-numeric strings.

Good Luck