[AccessD] mailto: in excel export of email address

[Darryl Collins]

Yes... The apostrophe text control is a legacy going back to Lotus 123 days.

The original Lotus label prefixes to control text alignment were:

                    ' APOSTROPHE        		Left-aligned
                    ^ CARET             		Centered
                    " DOUBLE QUOTE      	Right-aligned
                    \ BACKLASH          		Repeating

So if you wanted something to be centred you would enter  ^MyValueHere.  This is back in the days before toolbars and it was all text based controls.

Over the years only the ' survived in Excel and it is used to force the Excel to treat the cell value as a string (or Text in Excel parlance) rather than aligning (although being a string is usually default left aligns regardless.  It is important to be able to do this as Excel will convert anything that looks like a number into a value if it can, and that process is irreversible.  This is a huge problem for things like

 - Anything with a leading zero
 - Anything that looks like a scientific number (Hotel / meeting rooms and part numbers are particularly problematic here)
 - Any number > than 15 characters, so all credit card values for example.

For example, if your room or part number is 12E3 then Excel will convert that to 12,000 for you.  Bloody useless if you really did mean "12E3"

Or lots of part numbers have leading zero which are material to the result.  So you really need 000013120 to read that, not 13120.

Anyway, Hopefully that will shine some light onto the history and necessity of the apostrophe ' in Excel.

Cheers
Darryl




-----Original Message-----
From: AccessD [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Rocky Smolin
Sent: Friday, 4 September 2015 10:47 AM
To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'
Subject: Re: [AccessD] mailto: in excel export of email address

I forwarded your post to my client and told HER to try it.  I'll let you know what she says.

Tks

R


-----Original Message-----
From: AccessD [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Stuart McLachlan
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2015 2:51 PM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: Re: [AccessD] mailto: in excel export of email address

Give it a try.  Excel does all sorts of weird things, this is one of them.
A leading apostrophe is treating as a "text indicator".  Try entering '42 for example into a cell

Although you will see the leading apostrophe in the formula bar, you won't see it in the actual 
spreadsheet,   

If you select the cells and copy and paste them into some other application, the apostrophe won't be carried across.

If you "paste values" in the spreadsheet, it won't carry the apostrophe across (although a standard paste will)



On 3 Sep 2015 at 7:27, Rocky Smolin wrote:

> Stuart:
> 
> Won't that have the effect of the email address in the spreadsheet 
> having an apostrophe in the first position?
> 
> Rocky
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: AccessD [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf 
> Of Stuart McLachlan Sent: Wednesday, September 02, 2015 3:23 PM To:
> Access Developers discussion and problem solving Subject: Re:
> [AccessD] mailto: in excel export of email address
> 
> It's a long term  Excel "feature".  
> 
> https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/291209
> 
> You probably have the Autoformat optione turned off in Exccel while 
> the cilent has it turned on.
> 
> Suggest you try using the  option of prepending an apostrophe to that 
> field inr your export query.
> 
> 
> On 1 Sep 2015 at 14:14, Rocky Smolin wrote:
> 
> > Dear List:
> > 
> > I'm using TransferSpreadsheet on a table that has an email address 
> > in a text field.  when I export no problem, but when the client 
> > exports the email address shows up in the spreadsheet with 'mailto:'
> > prefixed to each email address.  I'm using 2003.  She is using 2010 
> > or perhaps 2013 (hard to tell from the screen shot).
> > 
> > Is this something that 2010 is adding?  Is there a solution?
> > 
> > MTIA,
> > 
> > Rocky Smolin
> > Beach Access Software
> > 858-259-4334
> > www.bchacc.com <http://www.bchacc.com/> www.e-z-mrp.com 
> > <http://www.e-z-mrp.com/>
> > Skype: rocky.smolin
> > 
> > 
> > 
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> > 
> 
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