Output to excel is not working properly

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Paúl Alejandro R asked Jul 31, '17 Mischa Spelt commented Aug 2, '17

Output to excel is not working properly

Hi! I'm trying to report my data summary to excel but when I open the file it seems like this:

What can I do?

Thanks!

Software Version:

FlexSim 17.1.2

excel export

error.png (117.1 KiB)

5 |100000

Attachments: Up to 12 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 23.8 MiB each and 47.7 MiB total.

Answer 1 · 2017-08-01T17:40:13Z

Ben Wilson answered Aug 1, '17 Mischa Spelt commented Aug 2, '17

Hi @Paúl Alejandro R,

Excel has opened a CSV file, which is a text file of comma separated values. Sometimes Excel can recognize the data boundaries and format the data into columns automatically. Other times, depending on your Excel settings and/or the format of the data, you need to help Excel break the data into columns.

If you go to the main ribbon, and go to the Data tab, you should find a button labeled "Text to Columns":

Clicking this button will open a wizard to help Excel parse your data appropriately.

2017-08-01-11-41-35-book1-excel.png (38.6 KiB)

· 1

5 |100000

Attachments: Up to 12 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 23.8 MiB each and 47.7 MiB total.

Mischa Spelt commented · Aug 02, 2017 at 05:04 PM

Most commonly the cause of this is having your computer set to a different locale, in which the comma is used as the decimal separator. In that case Excel expects CSV files to use the locale and is looking for semicolons (;) as field separators (which makes me wonder if the people at Microsoft stopped to think what CSV stands for in the first place... wasn't the whole point to have a machine-independent format)? FlexSim on the other hand does use commas as it should. I ran into this issue with our Dutch computers as well and ended up just setting Window's number format settings to English so I don't have to think about this every time I open a text file in Excel.

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