World Writer and Negative Amounts

[ssolberg]

With World Writer reports, like all others, you can change the Edit Code on numeric fields to be a variety of things, one of which is the use of the "floating" negative symbol (edit codes N-Q) so the negative symbol floats at the beginning of a numeric field instead of being at the end of them.

I recently needed to download a World Writer to a file (that I have such fields editted) and noticed that when I looked at the file, all these fields DID NOT have the negative symbol floating any longer. It is stuck on the end of the fields instead.

Does the Edit Code not work when outputting to a file?? And what does the "Packed To Zoned" attribute under the Additional Parameters really do? I tried changing it to a '1' but it didn't seem to make any changes. Tell me I'm missing something really easy here... I really gotta get the negative symbol to float so we can import these World Writers directly into Excel and download to "flat files" for export to outside sources. Help?

 

[scott_parker]

I don't understand what your issue is in regards to the Negative sign.
We use WW to make Excel files all the time and even when there is a Negative number Excel recognizes it as such.
We are then able to go to the Cell Formatting and change the display of it how we wish.


Scott Parker
Grote Industries, LLC
mailto:[email protected]





Scott Parker
Grote Industries, LLC.
WorldSoftware Version 8.1.2 AS/400 V5R1

 

[tpayne]

Maybe they are downloading the generated WW file as a text file rather than
as an Excel file?




Best Regards
Tony Payne - Senior Analyst/Programmer
Aker Plastics, Plymouth, Indiana
--------------------
4+ yrs JDE World Financials / Manufacturing
V5R2 / A7.3 cum14

 

[Tim_Miller]

I've run into this situation too, but not for a long time (we use
Showcase to pull our information from JDE). The problem is with Excel
in that when importing text files, if it sees a minus sign on the right
side of a number it assumes that it's text and not a number. Have you
tried marking negative numbers with parenthesis instead of a negative
sign? The other thing you can try as a workaround is a formula in Excel
to convert the number with a negative sign to a number Excel can
recognize. If a number is in cell A1, this formula should work:
=if(right(a1)="-",left(a1,len(a1)-1)*-1,a1). Good luck.

 

[ssolberg]

Re: RE: World Writer and Negative Amounts

Sorry, I think I just had a big brain cramp when I posted this... Yes, all is fine when I go directly into Excel with a file generated by a WW. The negative symbol is just fine. Also, if I download the WW file directly to a .TXT file, it looks just fine too.

I was looking directly at the database file on the 400 and not seeing the negative symbol float like I expected but I DON'T CARE WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE ON THE 400....

All appears to be fine. My brain was on *NOT_WORKING status, or as Homer Simpson would say "Doh!".