[R] Excel

[J.delasHeras at ed.ac.uk]

Yes, and then you save it, you open it again... same behaviour.
The only way I found around it was to insert a character at the  
beginning of every element in such columns. An apostrophe works, but  
it looks ugly. Yes, when loading the data in R you could easily clean  
it up automatically... doable.
You can add a space. Then it will not show, but you have to remember  
that if you ever use the data for labels etc. You shouldn't need to do  
that in the first place...

Jose

Quoting Erich Neuwirth <erich.neuwirth at univie.ac.at>:

> There is a hack to get around the problem.
> It is definitely not a good solution, just a hack.
>
> Open the .csv file in a text editor and select everything.
> Paste it into an empty Excel sheet.
> Then use Data -> Text to Columns
>
> The third dialog box (at least it is the third one in Excel 2003)
> allows you to format each column of the data. This is the place where
> you can switch off the date interpretation of your ID column.
>
> AUG1838 probably is not onterpreted as date because Excel dates only
> start at 1/1/1900.
>
>
> Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>> On 8/28/2007 3:16 AM, J Dougherty wrote:
>>> On Monday 27 August 2007 22:21, David Scott wrote:
>>>> On Tue, 28 Aug 2007, Robert A LaBudde wrote:
>>>>> If you format the column as "Text", you won't have this problem. By
>>>>> leaving the cells as "General", you leave it up to Excel to guess at
>>>>> the correct interpretation.
>>>> Not true actually. I had converted the column to Text because I saw the
>>>> interpretation as a date in the .xls file. I saved the .csv file *after*
>>>> the column had been converted to Text. Looking at the .csv file in a text
>>>> editor, the entry is correct.
>>>>
>>>> I have just rechecked this.
>>>>
>>>> On reopening the .csv using Excel, the entry AUG2699 had been interpreted
>>>> as a date, and was showing as Aug-99. Most bizarre is that the NHI value
>>>> of AUG1838 has *not* been interpreted as a date.
>>>>
>
> --
> Erich Neuwirth, University of Vienna
> Faculty of Computer Science
> Computer Supported Didactics Working Group
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Dr. Jose I. de las Heras                      Email: J.delasHeras at ed.ac.uk
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