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5/28/2010 6:55:55 AM
gaanthony
gaanthony
Posts 1 		I was testing Bulk AD Users and user accounts with Telephone attribute in E.164 format (e.g., +19805551234) lose the + when exporting. Even if I use the ' in Excel to set field to string and enter + before the phone number the import drops the + from the phone number. Tried a couple of things but no go.
Basically is there a way to Escape characters like the + so it's included in the import from CSV? Putting a \+ causes the Telephone field to become empty.
edited by gaanthony on 5/28/2010
5/31/2010 8:18:04 AM
admin
admin
Posts 331 		Hi,

The the value is incorrectly been converted into a number which causes the + sign and any leading zeros to be dropped from the data. Exporting to a CSV file will allow the data to be preserved, but you will have the same issue if you try to open the CSV file in Excel - Excel will incorrectly convert the data to a number.

To open the file correctly in Excel, you will need to use the "From Text" data import option. Specify the type as "delimited" and the delimiter as "Comma". You should see your data in grid format in the data preview. You will need to select the telephone number column and change the format to Text to allow the data to be read correctly be Excel.

If you re-save the CSV file from Excel, you will notice that Excel will again drop the + sign and any leading zeros, unless you use the "From Text" import option (The data is preserved in the text file, but Excel will have problems reading it properly). If you plan to use the file as an input to the CSV update feature, the Bulk AD Users application will also drop the + sign and any leading zeros. The original CSV export works fine with Bulk AD Users as the double quotes text qualifier causes the application to treat the data as text instead as a number. Excel drops the text qualifier which causes the Bulk AD Users application to also treat the data as a number. The easiest option to fix this problem is to create a schema.ini file.

If you are using the "Edit In Excel" feature, you can change the number format of the cells to "Text" to allow the data to be preserved in the update. Changing the number format won't re-add the plus sign and leading zeros automatically, but it will allow them to be persisted in the update.

The CSV import issue is also described in the documentation here: http://www.wisesoft.co.uk/software/bulkadusers/csv_update.aspx

Hope this helps,

David

PS

This is something I'll be looking to fix in the next release, but it might be a while before this is available. Until then, you can use a schema.ini file or quote your CSV files with double quotes.
edited by admin on 5/31/2010
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