Re: XML Spreadsheets (CGIDEV2) - Progress and Problem

Mystery solved ...

I was outsmarting myself. Or perhaps more accurately, I was trying to
outsmart Excel and instead being outsmarted by it.

Since it was easier to enter the field codes - e.g. /%myfld% - in
Excel than to edit the stream file in the IFS, I did that, then edited
the cell format to make it numeric before saving.

My unconscious assumption was that since I had been able to force
Excel into accepting that text really was text even if it looked like
a decimal number, by formatting the cell as text, then I ought to be
able to make a cell numeric format and force Excel to accept that
there would be numbers going in there (as indeed there would be).

But in fact Excel would not be convinced. The little man in there who
has been changing my (.csv) product codes to numbers and dropping
(vital) trailing zeroes all these years "knows" that /%whatever%/ is
not a number and he changes it to a string (whilst still retaining the
numeric formatting for the cell!)

It's a bit like HAL who went crazy trying to reconcile conflicting
objectives and tried to kill astronaut Bowman (I think that was in
Office 2001).

So, my choice is to either just put a zero in the template to avoid
Excel neurosis or to change the number format in the generated XML.
The latter will probably be simpler, but I've got the former as last
resort.