Export Format Business Insights

SOLVED

I am try to determine if there is a method to change the format of a column to plain text in one of our Business Insight Explorer views. 

The issue is: our accounts in Sage follow the naming convention "0000.00". Many accounts are similar to: "0215.13" and others go to 4 and 5 left-of-decimal digits. 

When we export to Excel, we get the predictable truncation of the leading zeroes and decimal zeroes, because it's recognizing the value as a number. I am able to use some formulas within Excel to fix the issue BUT I want to empower my non-techy but higher-ranked-than-I users to just simply export it and work with the data without IT's intervention. 

Is this possible?

  • +1
    verified answer

    Seems like you can't set a custom format for text fields using these settings.

    However, you can add a calculated column and use functions on one of the other fields.  For example, you could use the REPLACE function on the Account field and replace the "." with "-", may even want to prefix the field with an apostrophe too so excel treats it like a string.  Alternatively, if you want to piece the string's formatting together yourself, you can use multiple SUBSTRING functions to extract parts of the string.

    Using Replace.

    Using Substring.

  • 0 in reply to David Speck

    So I ended up doing this exact suggestion, and then in the exported Excel sheet I used =SUBSTITUTE(T2|"-"|".") and that got me my desired format so this can be imported in Sage without much adjustment. Thanks for the help