Afternoon - I am outputting data to a .xls file. The method I am using is simply adding:

Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel"

To the head of my .asp page. I would like this particular column to look like this (actual values):

23/10
8/10
43/10
9/10
25/10

However Excel is trying to be a bit smart and convert these to dates therefore my output when opened inside Excel is:

23-Oct (incorrect)
8-Oct (incorrect)
43/10 Correct
9-Oct (incorrect)
25-Oct (incorrect)

Any ideas how I can fix this inside the .ASP file so the these values do not get converted??

TYIA

Note - If I surrounf the value in double quotes inside the .asp page this works but of course the values have the double quotes around them in the .xls file which I would rather not see...

__________________
Wind is your friend
Matt

It's a mild hack, but if you put in a dummy second row (the first row will be the column titles, of course) with something that is obviously *NOT* a date, Excel might get it right.

Maybe you could have a second row that would be sub-titles. You and human users would know they were sub-titles, but Excel might take them as data.

Hi there - I will give that a go to see if it works however I think the client would want me to hide the row if it worked. Any trick you knwo of to hide it/other ideas?

__________________
Wind is your friend
Matt

How about using a row of dashes? So it looks like a separator line?

Or maybe put Chr(160) in each cell? (That *should* show up as a space character...it's what   is converted to in the browser.)

Or or or...

Hey, if Chr(160) works, you could prefix each of the fractions with it, maybe??

Yes yes very excellent!! Chr(160) as a prefix worked like a charm. As always thank you for your time and excellence!!

__________________
Wind is your friend
Matt

Sometimes I get lucky. <grin/> I was trying to figure out some innocuous character that you could throw in there that wouldn't muck up the display but would prevent Excel from seeing anything resembling a date. And I just happened to remember that I once copy/pasted one of those &nbsp; into VBScript and did (essentially) <%=Asc("&nbsp;")%> and it came out as 160. Voila.