Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Problems with Copy/Paste from Excel into C-Cure

When you copy a cell in Excel, end of line characters (CRLF) are included at the end of the data. Beware if you paste into C-Cure or other applications.

A customer had about 100 entries to add to an enumerated list. The entries were in a spreadsheet so he did a copy from Excel and paste into the Personnel\Configuration screen for the enumerated field. Then he created a template and attempted to import data into the field.

All records were rejected saying the enumerated values were unknown. When we manually selected a value from the pull-down, then exported the records, we say a line break. Unfortunately, it took a few hours of investigation before this was tried.

By editing the value on the configuration screen, we saw that you could hit delete then re-add the last character and the invisible characters at the end were removed and the import worked.

I have seem similar things happen when copying and pasting in Sql Server grids. Beware.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for warning me. I too have had much trouble with the COPY PASTE FROM EXCEL and it has betrayed me more times than I would like to publically state. Thank god there are people out there making sure the internet community is not ignorant of such dangers - pitholes on the information superhighway, as it were. In conclusion, this is my conclusion:

BEWARE.