Export to Excel From ASP: Text Data Interpretation issue

[Saur]

Hi,
I am using an export to excel functionality from my ASP
page.
I have set the content type as

Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel"
The data i am exporting has values like 1-2, 2-5
Now when they get exported to excel, these values get
exported as 1-02-2003,2-05-2003.

This is a feature of excel.
To overcome it in excel we usually put single quotes
before the data so that it gets interpreted as text data
i.e '1-2, '2-5. The single quotes are not visible to the
user and the data is shown as 1-2,2-5 to the user. The
single quotes are visible only when the user clicks on the
individual cell.

But when i export it from ASP page as '1-2, '2-5, these
single quotes remain visible in the excel page. I thought
the single quotes should not have been visible to the user.
They disappear only when we manually double click the cell.
Could someone plz let me know how to overcome this issue
programatically?

Cheers
Saur

 

[Alan]

Try outputting:

="1-2", ="2-5", etc...

(those are double quotes).

Regards,

Alan

 

[saur]

Hi,
Thanks a lot.
This seems to work.

Cheers
Saur

 

[Greg Griffiths]

check out http://www.greggriffiths.org/webdev/both/excel/ which covers
this topic.