I write Access queries from a large database containing chemical information that includes dates, text, and numerical values. For a number of reasons, the data are stored in Access as text. The numerical columns contain mixed numbers and text. For example, I may have a numerical value for a concentration [e.g. chloride; the number in the column might be 100] or a symbol for below detection [e.g., <5].

From Access I copy-paste, or copy paste-special-CSV into Excel, and then for each column must use Text to Columns to convert numerical values to numbers. Changing the format won’t work, so I’m stuck doing Text to Columns one column at a time for 20-30 columns. This is going to be repeated for about 100 sample sites.

Any ideas? This is the first time I’ve tried a blog site, and thanks for your help.

If your cells are formatted as Text, the you can convert the cells with “numbers” in them (not the blank cells though) using Text To Columns. Select your column of numbers, then click “Data/Text To Columns” on the menu bar, then click the Finish button… you dollar values should be real numbers now. To convert the blank cells to $0.00, use Replace… the cells you select for Text To Coluumns should still be selected (if not, re-select them)… click Edit/Replace on the menu bar, make sure there is nothing in the “From what” field and put $0.00 into the “Replace with” field and click the “Replace All” button. That should leave you with what you wanted.

…mrt

Unfortunately, SSRS is seeing all of the dimensional data as text, so it is text in the XML table. This means that if we try and do comparisons in DSUM like

Month to Maturity
>0
<=12

and it just doesn’t work.

The only solution I can think of is to create a schema, adjust that to state a type of integer, and then save that in the XML file directory. Unfortunately, this will amount to a ton of work (try creating a schema for an Excel file, we could only figure it out using InfoPath (sic!))