MSN formatting in Excel

In July this year, we discovered a bug in the MSN column of the Fleets Analyzer export. The column was formatted as “number” and therefore any preceding zeros were being stripped away e.g. 00123 would become 123. A fix was put in place and included in the release on 27th July. Unfortunately, the fix was not satisfactory and caused further issues for our users e.g VLOOKUP no longer worked on cells that contained an MSN.

A new fix was developed where we forced the cell to have the format of “General”, this is identical to how the column is formatted in the existing exports from Ascend Fleets. It’s worth noting, however, that Excel will continue to show the “The number in this cell is formatted as text or preceded by an apostrophe” message against cells that Excel considers to contain a numeric value, and, selecting the cell, then clicking in the formula bar, and then selecting a cell (any cell) will result in Excel converting the text to a number, and stripping out any preceding zeros, this a feature of Excel.

The updated fix is due to go live this Wednesday (23rd August). I would personally like to apologise for any inconvenience this issue has caused to our users.