When you download to .csv from Summit, you may need to adjust your Excel spreadsheet to properly view your data. This article shows the two basic corrections that can be made in Excel to properly show your Summit download. Note that we don't see these issues using Google Sheets but the resolutions would also work if they occurred there, too.


Problem 1: Columns are full of # marks


In the image below, you can see that Column D is presenting #'s instead of the Patient DOB. This is because the column width is too small to fit the minimum subset of data. 


There are two ways to fix this:

  1. Double-click the right-most column separator between D and E. This will automatically resize the column to fit the length of the data.
  2. Click and drag the right-most column separator between D and E to choose the width of the column. Once the column is wide enough to show the data within, the #'s should go away.




Problem 2: Data is showing as #NAME?


Look at E2 in the picture above. You can see it is displaying #NAME? instead of the Treatment Set name (the other rows below it are showing the data correctly: TS 1, TS 2, etc.). This happens if a Treatment Set (or really, any field value) contains a plus (+) or minus (-) symbol at the beginning. This makes Excel interpret the data as a broken formula, so presents the cell with their #NAME? error code.


Solution

  1. Close the file and open Excel to a Blank Workbook.
  2. In the main ribbon, click Data > From Text/CSV.
  3. Select the CSV file you want to view.
  4. It will give you a preview. Click Load.
  5. You should now see all your data properly.


The attached video shows this process.



Resolved


Here is the same .csv export with both of the issues resolved.