ISQL Data - Export support for Excel format

[glenn_barber]

When we moved from SA9 to SA11 one of the biggest complaints from developers and users was the loss of the feature in SQL Central to save data to an excel format. This was almost a staple for support team members who frequently ran queries for our customers and sent them data via spreadsheets.

Now the nearest feature is saving as HTML and then reprocessing the HTML into a spreadsheet - but this introduces a number of formatting and conversion steps.

Is there any chance this feature may return in a future version of SQL Central - or is there an alternate way to get the data into excel more quickly?

[glenn_barber]

It turns out that there were some differences between the csv extension export and the excel which caused some problems or extra steps.

Talking with our support people - I discovered their biggest complaint was the loss of the ability to Import Excel data into the database. I had only been focused on the Export feature that I used.

In the normal course of support customers provide us with information which they would like to compare to or import into the database. This is always supplied in an excel spreadsheet.

[Breck_Carter]

http://sqlanywhere.blogspot.com/2008/12/select-from-excel-spreadsheets.html

[glenn_barber]

I would imagine this would include the users creating target tables and executing a "select into" sourced from the excel spreadsheet. The Wizard solution was a lot easier and quicker for them to use. Its mystifying why the Import and Export from Excel features disappeared from Sybase Central if the underlying capabilities still existed in the SQL engine.

[glenn_barber]

I wanted to followup with a note that clarifies why this continues to be an issue.

The problem with the CSV or HTML outout is the problem with Text values which are numeric. When output in the old excel format , these opened fine. When output at CSV or HTML you can't just open these with excel because it converts the values to numeric and strips leading zeros.

To handle this correctly you have to export a tab separated file and use the Excel Import - specifying the datatype of individual columns. A huge PITA which we need to do frequently.

Please bring back the excel export format...