One of our collections uses Museum Software’s PastPerfect database, and as part of the barcoding project, they’re making lists of objects to have barcode labels printed for. You can export these lists to Excel, and BarTender can use Excel as a data source, so you’d think this would be a pretty easy workflow, and for the most part it is.
But it turns out that there are some objects in the collection with catalog numbers like “3.2E12”. And Excel really wants to be helpful, so when it sees something that’s almost in scientific notation, it nudges it into the right format. So that catalog number becomes “3.2E+12”, or “3.20E+12”, and it doesn’t keep the original string around anywhere. Even if you convert those fields back to text, they stay reformatted. So it has to be fixed before Excel imports it. Continue reading “Exporting to Excel from PastPerfect”