Saturday, December 17, 2005

Bug in Excel

I created a two column csv file using Excel:

Norway,no
Denmark,dk
Sweden,se
Germany,de
Norway,no
Denmark,dk
Sweden,se
Germany,de
Norway,no
Denmark,dk
Sweden,se
Germany,de
Norway,no
Denmark,
Sweden,
Germany,
Norway
Denmark
Sweden
Germany

If you look carefully, you'll notice that there is a comma missing in the last four rows. This means that it does not have two columns and the file is useless.

The workaround is to swap the two columns:

no,Norway
dk,Denmark
se,Sweden
de,Germany
no,Norway
dk,Denmark
se,Sweden
de,Germany
no,Norway
dk,Denmark
se,Sweden
de,Germany
no,Norway
,Denmark
,Sweden
,Germany
,Norway
,Denmark
,Sweden
,Germany

The bug is described here.

No comments: