How to avoid Importing data into a text field being converted into a number

February 10, 20169 yr

Hello,

I have data to import into a text field from excel or csv files. As samples, I have :

978.510
978.510.21

These are reference numbers. They should not be changed. The problem comes with the first sample as fm converts it into a number. It removes the last zero and change the dot to a coma (local culture info). The field is declared as text, indexed, not null and unique.

978.510 => 978,51 - not ok
978.510.21 => 978.510.21 - ok

Thanks.

February 10, 20169 yr

I don't think Filemaker does that. I certainly cannot reproduce the problem using .csv as the source. When you import directly from Excel, the result may be affected by the way the cell is formatted in the source document.

February 10, 20169 yr

Excel will be the problem here, when it exports file's as CSV it converts things it thinks are numbers into numbers, and no amount of tweaking on the FileMaker side will fix this. Importing directly from Excel format, rather than converting to CSV has helped me in these situations.