Excel export error - exports numbers only, not words

When I export part of my collection (tag = DVD) in Excel, no words were exported - only numbers show up. I successfully exported all fields to Excel in February and have some of those downloads saved (Feb. 4 thru 29), so I can see that only fields that only contain numbers exported today. Fields with words or words plus numbers are empty today.

Do you see the same if you try to export your full catalog?

>2 lorax:

Also, have you tried opening the file in a second spreadsheet program, to see if there is some hidden data?

>2 lorax: Just tested more fully. It happens w TAGS = DVD and with the entire catalog. If I export a Collection or Entry Date (tried several each), those work normally. When I export the TAGS = DVD and when I export the full catalog, I got a warning message from Microsoft Excel, which I didn't receive with those other successful exports, that says "We found a problem with some content in "librarything...xls. Do you want to try to recover as much as we can? If you trust the source of this workbook, click yes". So I click yes and just get the fields that have numbers.

I get a message from Microsoft after downloading that says it's only allowing opening in Protected View because of the detected problem that may be dangerous to my computer... If you need to edit and you trust this file, then enable editing. What to do?

>3 waltzmn: I'm afraid I'm a computer idiot stumbling along and don't know how to do that. I tried exporting as tab delimited but don't know how to deal with what I got.

I can't replicate this with my entire catalog, so I suspect there's something awry with one of your DVDs that's throwing things off. At a glance I see weird characters in the Subject of Risen - unfortunately Subject isn't an editable field, so what I would recommend as a test is deleting that title, trying the export again, and then if it works re-adding it from a different source than what you used previously.

>5 StJosephIssaquah:

For tab-delimited, go into Excel and open it using the Open command. If it starts asking you questions, just choose the default options. But that may not work even if the data is fine, because tab-delimited is a little tricky sometimes.

Good luck!

Excel is also super-territorial and doesn't like anything it didn't create. But you can open a TSV using something like Notepad if you need to just to check "are the non-numeric fields present?"

My own TSV export certainly contains stuff where I wouldn't be surprised if Excel got upset. The subject field isn't guaranteed to be unicode, so any program trying to parse it should take care.

For fun you can try to find the offending record and report here what was wrong :-)

I seem to recall you can run the output through a UTF-8 converter to clear up issues. There are a handful of books in my catalogue that break Excel because of some accented characters in various fields. I think I cleaned up the ones in editable fields, but couldn't do anything about the ones in the subject field.

>6 lorax: I deleted that entry, downloaded and had the same problem = numbers only and warning notices

THANK YOU for your hints and help - I found and fixed the cause of the problem. It took me 3.5 hrs but I kept narrowing down the date of the bad data then tried downloading collections and tags until I found the culprit = smiley face that I'm sure I'd originally typed in as a colon and parenthesis

This is closed

>12 StJosephIssaquah: Thanks for tracking that down. It is really difficult to debug data :-)