Custom Tag and Data Element exports are auto-formatted as dates by Excel#382
I like this feature a lot! It’d also be great to have a DE frequency too.
Also, just so you know the formating when you export results in dates being shown. For example, prospective cohort has 9/51 and it shows as Sep-51. There isn’t a way in excel to get this formatted properly to display 9/51, which is what we want.
By DE frequency, I mean how many times something was extracted. Sometimes we are able to tag for something and not extract it.
Gross - we failed to consider this long standing bug/feature of Excel. Will Excel still type 9 / 51 as a date? I believe we add spaces in other locations.
It won’t work. :( The only cells where it works are when the numerator is > 12 (aka it can’t be a month)
I typed in 9 / 51 in excel and tried different formats and couldn’t get it to work.
oh. my. gosh. I’m sorry, what can we do here?
My impractical/hardline response is to just use google sheets :D
This feature isn’t particularly urgent for me so I’m fine with doing nothing about this for a bit.
I mean, what format can we use? Perhaps % (n/N) will avoid their type-casting?
Here are some options that work in excel:
- 9\51
- 9//51
- 9 out of 51
Your suggestion is better though! I like % (n/N)
% (n/N) is also pretty typical of journal publications, so I support it! I’ll note that this problem also impacts custom exports of Data Elements.
This was fixed, but we forgot to mark complete here :) Thanks all!