Scientific

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Hi have an excel sheet which has ID numbers of varying length. I need to search each one in a cloud based application. I have a loop to search each one and check if there is a result. My problem is with a certain type of ID. Some are 22 numeric digits (e.g. 230883252008675000) and excel defaults these to scientific format. When I format as a number to help UiPath see it correctly, I still see UiPath type these in on the search like a scientific format 2.31E+17. How can I read these correctly? Is there an assign I can use to convert?

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Large numeric values in Excel should be treated as Text. Typically, it’s easier to format the entire column as text before the data is inserted. The reason UiPath defaults to this simplified scientific notation is that Excel itself will reduce the number of digits stored.

Besides, a number that large should be text, since you are probably not going to perform arithmetic functions on an ID.

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Thanks Anthony, that’s a big help. I’m actually picking the values up orginally from a csv and now realizing I am losing leading zeros as I do that. Is there a way to guarantee I pick up a value as text from csv which retains the leading 0?

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You’ve taught me something with this one. If you use the Build Datatable activity to define your column datatypes as strings beforehand, the data from your CSV will be read as strings, meaning leading zeroes and long numbers will be retained.

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