Re: CSV File Creation to include Excel formula

On Thu, Apr 5, 2018 at 10:45 AM, <dlclark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I don't think it is related to code page -- as long as the text
content of the CSV is viewable on the Windows side.

I agree with this.

Otherwise, I think I
can say that if the cell gets stored in a comma-delimited CSV as follows:

...,"=("""")",...

Then Excel will treat it as the text value for the cell.

Correct.

On the
other hand, if the cell content gets stored in a comma-delimited CSV as
follows:

...,=(""),...

Then Excel will treat it as a formula for the cell.

Correct again.

If a
tab-delimited CSV is created then you might get better results because
outer quotes aren't used for string values when tabs are used for the
delimiter.

Interestingly, when Excel creates tab-delimited files (note that I am
not talking about any IBM commands here), it still uses the outer
quotes if the cell contains commas or quotes.

Back to the IBM commands: OP said they're using CPYTOSTMF, not
CPYTOIMPF. Which suggests they've already written the "fully formed
CSV" to a source member, and simply want to dump that member,
character for character, into an IFS stream file (excluding the line
numbers and line dates, of course).

CPYTOSTMF wouldn't inject quotation marks, and wouldn't know how to
escape quotation marks. So I don't believe that is the problem either.

What I would want to see is not just the hex on the 5250 side, but
also the Windows side. Actually the Windows side is more important,
since the customer evidently wants to open this in Excel.

(I would also question the customer's requirement for this formula,
but that is another issue, and perhaps not a battle to fight at this
time.)

John Y.