Excel: Text May Be Lost When Saving in a DBF File Format

ID: Q74618

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Excel for the Macintosh, versions 2.2, 3.0, 4.0

SUMMARY

When a Microsoft Excel database is saved in dBASE format (DBF 2, DBF 3, DBF 4), the first record beneath the field names is used to determine the data type assigned to each field.

Data can be lost if a field contains a mixture of numbers and text. To avoid this problem, each field should contain only one type of data.

MORE INFORMATION

If the first cell in a field contains a numeric entry, Microsoft Excel assumes that the rest of the data in the column is also numeric. If there are any textual entries, these are skipped and blank entries result.

If the first cell in a field contains a textual entry, any numbers in the same column are written as text.

Additional query words: 2.20 3.0 4.00

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