# Crystal Reports sees Excel text as number



## LeeRRMC (Jul 29, 2009)

I have an Excel spreadsheet where all cells are formatted as text.  Crystal Reports interprets some of the columns as number.  What's needed to make Crystal Reports see all the columns as strings?


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## xenou (Aug 1, 2009)

Possibly if you can seed the first 10-50 rows with sample/dummy data you'll clue the report engine correctly.  Sort of like giving it a hint.

text text text text
text text text text
text text text text
text text text text
text text text text
   1   Mr  Sam  Bay
   2   Mr  Joe  Wig
   3  Mrs  Joy  Red

The above, if you can later ignore or filter out the dummy data, would probably transfer over correctly - including the first column as text, even though in the last lines there are numbers.


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## crystalreportwriter (Dec 11, 2012)

The other alternative I used to fix this problem - was create another column (say C) which is TEXT(B).


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## crystalreportwriter (Dec 11, 2012)

=TEXT(B2,0)   (ps =- I was unable to edit my other post to correct this part)


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