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Once you have submitted your data to Enable, you may notice that a few areas need reformatting. Below is a guide on some common formatting standards, along with instructions on how to address these standards.

Date formatting

Within Enable, the accepted date format is YYYY-MM-DD. To format a column’s date in this way, first highlight the date column. Then, select the Number Formatting dropdown option, located in the Excel ribbon at the top of the app. From here, choose More Number Formats… and, in the window that pops up, select Date, choose the YYYY-MM-DD option, and click OK.

Decimal points

Some fields within data files will require a specific number of decimal places, while others may have a maximum number of permitted decimal places. To format the correct number of decimal places, first select the intended column. Then, select the Number Formatting dropdown option, located in the Excel ribbon at the top of the app. From here, choose More Number Formats… and select Custom, selecting the 0.00 option. Once this is selected, 0.00 will appear in the box below Type:. You can change this to hold as many decimal places as you need – for example, if 4 decimals are required, you can set the format to be 0.0000. Once you have specified the correct number of decimals, click OK.

Leading 0s

The Enable system uses CSV files for handling and storing data. When saving a CSV, it may eliminate leading zeros from numbers – for example, 00001056 may be changed to 1056, if your sheet is incorrectly formatted. However, if leading zeros need to be preserved, there is a solution. First, select the intended column. Then, select the Number Formatting dropdown option, located in the Excel ribbon at the top of the app. From here, choose More Number Formats… and select Custom, selecting the 0 option. Once this is selected, 0 will appear in the box under Type:. You can change this to determine how many digits you would like – for example, if 4 digits are required, you can set the format to be 0000 (4 zeros). This will ensure that all your numbers appear to be the same length. Once you have specified the correct number of digits, click OK.

Commas in text

In CSV files, values are separated by commas. This means text values with commas will need to be reformatted, so that the singular value isn’t counted as two separate ones. To do this, ensure that all values that include a comma are placed within double quotation marks. For example, if a Location column has London, England as a value, the cell’s data should read “London, England”, lest it be divided into two separate values, ‘London’ and ‘England’.

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