this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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[–] driving_crooner 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

It completely screws up numbers if the column is a number and the number is over 15 digits long.

I work in insurance in Brazil, by standards of our regulatory body, claims numbers must be a string of 20 numbers (zfill(20) if needed). You can't imagine the amount of times excel had fucked me up rounding down the claim numbers, this is one of the first things I teach to my interns and juniors when they're working with the claims databases.

[–] blackbirdbiryani@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Could you import the column in as text to preserve it?

[–] driving_crooner 1 points 1 month ago

Sure, but sometimes you need to do a pivot table and get transformed, or you while working you accidentally made it a number, or just because excel being excel it import the number as scientific notation, or any other case.