Monthly Archives: February 2009

Web Development

Updates for IE8

With the release of IE8 getting closer I took a moment to check out our web site and Benchmarks Online in the new browser. As I suspected, the incompatibilities on our web site were of the same ilk as when IE7 was released and required minor updates. The updates to Benchmarks were also fairly minor, though did require a bit of effort to track down. Luckily IE8 includes developer tools right in the browser, making debugging web content much easier.

While I was at it, I decided to see how the JS+CSS was working in Safari (latest version on Windows and Mac) and Opera (latest versions on Windows). There were some minor issues with these browsers that I fixed as well. Quickly, Safari and Opera both were having trouble displaying the bullets in my ordered list when the pseudo multi-column-styling was applied. The odd thing is that the numbers were there, just not visible until an element was forced on top of them.

Finally, I decided to update the multi-column list code on the web site to that used in Benchmarks (which is more robust). I did run across one problem in the update that I may have to investigate further. Essentially, the script was not correctly positioning the second+ columns if a margin was specified on the container OL/UL.

Web Development

Excel drops empty columns on CSV export

I’m often tasked with getting data from a flat format (Excel, CSV, etc.) into a database. When the format is Excel  and I have only a few files to work with I find it easiest to export the Excel file to CSV or TSV format. This makes it much easier to script the data conversion using PHP. There’s only one problem, Excel doesn’t always represent the total number of columns in each row. If there are blank values in the columns at the end of a row in the spreadsheet then the exported data may have fewer value delimeters than expected.

This bug has been documented by Microsoft for Excel 2003 and earlier. The solution given by Microsoft is poorly worded, but basically it says to make sure the cells at the end of a row always contain data. Not always a realistic proposition. Luckily I found a step-by-step solution that works perfectly:

Put a formula that evaluates to empty (=”” ) in the last column of  the rows that are empty:

  1. select the range in the last column: edit->goto, click on the “Special…” button, Choose “Blanks” and click OK.
  2. type the formula: =””
  3. hit ctrl-enter

Now when you save the document the appropriate number of delimeters should be present, even in rows with empty cells.