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Answered FormIt export results corrupted

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    fvaughn Reply #1, 8 years ago
    All,

    I've searched the forum but have not found a thread so far with this exact issue. If it exists, I apologize and please link me.

    I am running MODX Revolution 2.4.3-pl with the latest FormIt, 2.2.10-pl.

    When trying to use the "Export" feature to convert all of the collected data to a CSV/Excel, I get something like the following (see attached). It's useless to us since all of the data isn't correctly in the cells/rows. There's no coherent order to how it's exported - it seems to just jumble the data into the Excel format.

    Has anyone seen this - is there a common root cause?


    Thanks,
    Fred

    This question has been answered by clareoconsulting. See the first response.

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      BobRay Reply #2, 8 years ago
      I haven't messed with Excel for a long time, but when I did, CSV and Excel were two different formats. Are you maybe trying to read a CSV file into Excel without telling Excel that's what it is?

      Also, are you telling Excel that there's a header row in the data?

      BTW, when I say it's been a long time, I wrote code to import and export from and to Excel files. It was so long ago that no code existed for that, and the Excel format was not public. I spent several weeks saving various Excel files and staring at them in a hex editor until I deduced the format (definitely not CSV). wink
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        clareoconsulting Reply #3, 8 years ago
        Quote from: fvaughn at Apr 14, 2016, 02:25 PM
        convert all of the collected data to a CSV

        Looking at your screen captures, it appears that the export from Formit is not CSV (comma-separated-value) but rather semi-colon separated values.

        Something to try:

        1. If the downloaded filename has a ".csv" extension, rename it so that it has a ".txt" extension. If it's .csv, Excel, on opening the file, will try to separate the values by commas. Since there are no commas, each row goes into one cell as you have it in your import
        2. Using Excel's File/Open dialog, open the .txt file; Excel should then initiate its "Text Import Wizard"
        3. In the wizard, select "Delimited" and then for the delimiter, select the semi-colon.
          • 52075
          • 9 Posts
          fvaughn Reply #4, 8 years ago
          Quote from: clareoconsulting at Apr 15, 2016, 11:19 AM
          Quote from: fvaughn at Apr 14, 2016, 02:25 PM
          convert all of the collected data to a CSV

          Looking at your screen captures, it appears that the export from Formit is not CSV (comma-separated-value) but rather semi-colon separated values.

          Something to try:

          1. If the downloaded filename has a ".csv" extension, rename it so that it has a ".txt" extension. If it's .csv, Excel, on opening the file, will try to separate the values by commas. Since there are no commas, each row goes into one cell as you have it in your import
          2. Using Excel's File/Open dialog, open the .txt file; Excel should then initiate its "Text Import Wizard"
          3. In the wizard, select "Delimited" and then for the delimiter, select the semi-colon.

          Thanks so much. That worked perfectly. Now the question becomes how to get FormIt to automatically do that.

          Also, BobRay, thanks for your reply.