Problem with Queries

Susan Trippe
Susan Trippe
Kudos 4 Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT® General Discussions

I noticed that BB has added the capability to run a query as either an excel file or a csv file recently. This is a nice option, but I'm having one major issue. When I choose to run a query as an excel file, the numbers appear as text instead of numbers. I have to convert the text to numbers first before using the query. Is there a way to remedy this problem? This does not happen when I run queries as a csv file, but then I have to remember to save it as an excel file for it to remember any changes I make to the file.

Tagged:

Answers

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 Facilitator 3 Raiser's Edge NXT Fall 2025 Product Update Briefing Badge

    I think this would have to be an Idea Bank ask. Blackbaud simply took every field, and output as string of text. While I think BB can do better and create the excel file knowing the data type of the column, it will take significantly more programming in the backend for them to delivery that.

    CSV on the other hand, is a little better. While BB is still outputing all string of text, when Excel opens a CSV file, it does some intelligent guess on the column data and automatically make it the correct data type it guessed on. CSV also allow exporting of more than 1M+ rows, whereas Excel has a 1M limit (specifically it is 1,048,576 rows)

Categories