Excel export and numbers

[murphyalexandre]

I'm trying to export numbers to Excel to be able to do sums, but it seems that the integer field is not being exported as a number.

Is there a way to force number export so that the cell format is right on load and we can do functions on those fields ?

[bmihelac]

Minimal test case would help to identify where the issue is...

[murphyalexandre]

That's the thing, there's no real test case, only a file that, when opened up in Excel, doesn't have the 'number' format at thus cannot be used in functions.

[kupuguy]

The issue here is that the default Widget.render() returns force_text(value) which forces any numbers to a text representation.

This seems to be a general problem with both importing and exporting Excel data. For example, I just tried to import an Excel sheet and one of the columns in my model is a models.DateField. The spreadsheet contains dates in the relevant column, which means the Dataset gets floating point numbers (Excel stores dates as floating point). The import_export DateWidget then tries to call strptime on the floating point value.

I think the widget interface needs to know which external format is required. Text is fine for the text formats but just doesn't hack it for numbers, booleans, and date/time values.

[bmihelac]

@murphyalexandre can you try changes in 149-excel-export-and-numbers branch and let me know if this fix the issue persists.

@kupuguy good note, I agree for not converting numeric values to string. If format needs a string it will convert it itself.
Regarding dates, DateWidget currently has optional format argument and that is why it needs to be a string. Date fields could easily use IntegerWidget, of course then it will be represented in all formats as numbers. Let's open new issue for this.

[murphyalexandre]

That last commit did the trick. Thank you so much!