On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 11:54 AM, Vernon Hamberg
<vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Well, you and I are talking about different contexts within a worksheet - my
point was limited to data types in a column - Excel allows any data types in
different cells in a given column.
One part of it is that we're both talking about Excel allowing
multiple types within one column. In your context, this is what
allows the headings to be a different type than the (rest of the)
data. So you can have a text heading for a numeric column.
The other part that I brought up, which indeed is a different issue,
is a combination of the above property plus two more: (1) CSV data
actually has no explicit types whatsoever (as much as some folks want
it to), and (2) Excel (the program) aggressively coerces what it
believes to be numeric-looking data into actual numeric data (which it
*does* distinguish from text).
The implication being that if you write data to a CSV, and it's read
by Excel, you may not always get the data type you intended. Even the
headings can be interpreted in unintended ways. (The most dramatic
being the case where the heading of the first column is 'ID'!)
So yes, I brought up a different issue, using your comment purely as a
(perhaps flimsy) segue. And I only brought it up because I know there
are still folks out there who are new to the interactions between
database tables, CSVs, and Excel, and can easily be bitten.
John Y.
midrange.com
