Excel Export Does Not Work With Some Delimiters [#370349]

I am trying to use the export/download feature. When choosing export format, Microsoft Excel and Delimited text format as comma delimited, I get the following warning from Excel:

The file you are trying to open, 'enter_the_awards.xls', is in a different format than specified by the file extension. Verify that the file is not corrupt and is from a trusted source before opening the file. Do you want to open the file now?

I click 'yes' and as you can see from the attached file, it's totally garbled.

I've also verified this on other windows based machines. The version of Excel is

Many thanks for the module, and any help is much appreciate.

Comment	File	Size	Author
#4	webform_export_excel.patch	682 bytes	quicksketch
#4
	enter_the_no_nonsense_nurse_awards.xls	838 bytes	blueflowers

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Comments

Comment #1

korvus CreditAttribution: korvus commented 8 February 2009 at 16:36

I can open that just fine under OpenOffice...

Comment #2

blueflowers CreditAttribution: blueflowers commented 9 February 2009 at 19:32

MS Excel is not part of the OpenOffice suite. So, I'm not sure what you mean, when you say that you can open it in OpenOffice.

Comment #3

quicksketch

he/him

CreditAttribution: quicksketch commented 10 February 2009 at 06:51

At the time of the new export tool, I tested the functionality in Office 2004 and 2008 on Mac and XP and 2007 on Windows. In the 2007 version of Excel for Windows, it does give you a nasty sounding warning saying that the file data does not match the contents of the file. However, in my tests it managed to open it up okay anyway.

Now however, there does seem to be something wrong with the output, but I'm not entirely sure what might have caused this. All the data is crammed into a single field instead of being broken out into separate rows and columns. It still opens fine if you open Excel, then select "Open" or "Import" from the menu though, since it walks you through the steps to select correct delimiter.

Comment #4

quicksketch

he/him

CreditAttribution: quicksketch commented 14 February 2009 at 01:05

Status:

Active

» Fixed

File	Size
webform_export_excel.patch	682 bytes

Ah, okay I found the problem. The Excel exporter should ignore the delimiter entirely (it's always tabs). This patch has been committed and should fix the problem. As a work-around, just leave the default export delimiter to tabs and everything should be fine. In case you're wondering, tabs are the default delimiter rather than CSV because the specification for CSV specifies it's ASCII only, so special characters will not work in CSV. TSV is much more reliable.