create a download a CSV button

[Dillon_Jamison]

When I am downloading a .csv file from my base when opening the file in Microsoft Excel some of the data is missing/changed. The field that is having the issue is a linked field that lists numbers from an autonumber field. It seems that after 5 sets of 3 digit numbers the numbers just change to zeros. I have attached photos of the data from Airtable and what I am seeing in Excel.

[ScottWorld]

Change your Excel field to a text field, and see what happens.

[Dillon_Jamison · Accepted solution]

After doing some researching on Excel, I figured out that Excel has a limit of 15 significant numbers and any number after that will be a 0. Changing the field type to text type changes the data to scientific notation messing the data up even further. From what I understand if the file was changed to a text field before entering the data this method would work, but since the data is already there it can’t be fixed. I ended up just adding a letter to my data sets (by adding a new column with a formula field that has the autonumbers plus a letter {Split #}&“R” ) so it would automatically recognize the data as text rather than a number.

[Bill_French]

Dillon_Jamison:

I figured out that Excel has a limit of 15 significant numbers and any number after that will be a 0

There’s also the floating point bug in Airtable to be mindful of.

[Pablo_Rios]

It appears that Airtable adds a BOM (BYTE ORDER MARK) to the beginning of the CSV file that then drops any leading zeros from my Serial Number field in the Excel file.  Is there a different version of CSV download that would keep the leading zeros?