Clarity

Hi Everyone,

When you export to Excel (we are 12.04 Oracle) from a porlet (can pick even simple one such as project list), the file name says .xls but when you open it (or attempt to save) it is really an .xml file. You have to do a save as to save it as a true .xls or in this user's case, a .csv. However, some fields don't export correctly such as the project id, for the .csv file to recognize it as a number (in our case, our ids are auto numbered and are all numbers) . Though I don't feel this is a true Clarity issue, I advised I would ask others for information. Here are my questions

1. Is there a way to directly export the data to a csv file? (I wasn't sure if 12.1 offerred anything as we are upgrading very soon). Instead of Clarity defaulting it to an xml file (not even an xls file)

2 This user takes the CSV file and puts into Text pad (note pad on steroids) and often he will see the , , , where values should be (example might see the , , , for project ids) I am told this means it can't recognize it thus puts nulls, and so he says Clarity is not exporting the data correctly to the XML (keep in mind, I disagree, as some times it DOES work). So, my question is-- could there be something in the data records or portlet settings that would make this work sometimes but not others (two different porlets)?

3. I searched this community and I search the support site and found nothing on CSV files, other than XOG related-- so does anyone even export data from Clarity to use in a CSV file? If so, how do you do it so that there are no commas (null , , , ). The only thing I found remotely close is an old situation where a user might have two different versions of Excel, but this is not the case.

Thanks
Lynn

I can export to excel (Excel v2003) the Project ID just fine. I can get it into Textpad just fine.

My Project IDs are not numeric, but when I export only a numeric Project ID Excel does behave slightly differently; it starts putting "Number stored as text" warning messages against the cells etc.

So I suspect your problems are with how Excel is handling your column and also what your users are then doing in Excel and Textpad "downstream" of Clarity.

--

You can probably "fix" this with a simple reformatting exercise in Excel immediately when you open the XLS; you can put that into a little VBA macro if your users can't cope with doing that manually.

I'm trying to say that you have an "Excel problem" rather than a "Clarity problem" (so the fix is in Excel not Clarity!) :huh:

Thanks Dave

that is what we are trying to say to the user.. and yes the little arrow appears to "convert to number' in Excel, but the user says he can't spend time reformatting it :wacko:


I am not a macro or Excel guru, but I agree that when we export data and it works sometimes and sometimes does not (for him, but one was me walking him through it and the other was an Excel file he created) tells me it is not a Clarity problem.
He tried to say that the dates don't export as date fields (but when i walked him through it,the dates showed as format type = date in Excel)
and so forth.

thanks again-- if anyone else has any additional 'power' i can use it is welcomed.

Lynn

Is there a difference between Office 2003 and Office 2007/2010 or Office 2003 + compatibility pack?
Exporting list view to 2010 brings numeric ID OK though with the remark, saving to CSV without any additional formatting and opening in notepad give numeric ID's that look quite normal.

Martti K.

ThanksMarti!
We are indeed still on 2003 :(
so I will check on that.. (compatibilty pack and then offer the advise of office 2010)

Did some testing and the conclusion is below.

Basically using the Export to Excel and to xlsx is simples and allows proper formatting of numbers and dates for saving into CSV files without any additional steps.
You can open the xlsx files are used with Excels 2007 and newer, but you can open them if you have the File format compatibility pack installed.
For more details and details how graphics behave in export see the pdf files.


Martti K.