Excel: We found a problem with some content

Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Apr 2, 2020
 

We have seen an issue when downloading certain formats of data in Excel. The issue crops up in an error message like this when trying to open the downloaded spreadsheet:
Screen Shot 2020-04-02 at 5.00.27 PM.png


If you say Yes, it will tell you "Excel was able to open the file by repairing or removing the unreadable content"

You can use binary testing (aka delete each column one by one) to narrow down the particular column and row that holds the data causing the problem - in a lot of cases these are columns that hold phone numbers, which Excel doesn't seem to like.

From here, you can use SQL or REGEXP_REPLACE on the underlying data field to get it into a format Excel will accept, to fix the error.

This content is subject to limited support.                

Comments
von_court
New Member

Hi, as an example: we experience this issue for “tier” fields where we try to format fractional values (i.e. [0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8]) with “value_format_name: percent_0”. Seems like Excel has issues displaying “[60%, 80%)” and “repairs” it to “[0.6, 0.8]”.

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Last update:
‎06-28-2021 11:51 AM
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