Whenever employee numbers contain leading zeros (i.e. 004), trailing zeros (i.e. 4.00) or slashes (i.e. 4/2) this can lead to issues when opening and importing Comma Delimited CSV files: leading and trailing zeros will fall off and slashed can lead to recalculation of the number. As this will change the employee number, the system will read this as a new record, creating a duplicate if the employee number was imported correctly before.
This is not because Comma Delimited CSV files do not save the correct information, but is rather due to a formatting issue when opening Comma Delimited CSV files in Excel. When a Comma Delimited CSV file is opened in Excel, all columns are formatted to “general”, resulting in the removal of leading/trailing zeros and recalculating numbers with slashes.
By opening Comma Delimited CSV files in the way described below, the employee number column can be formatted to “text” preventing a change in the employee number.
Step 1
Download the csv-file but do not open the file
Step 2
Open a new Excel spreadsheet
Step 3
In the Data tab, select From Text (third from the left) and select the downloaded file by going to the downloads folder, sorting by Date Modified and selecting the last file
