Details
After a recent upgrade to the Microsoft Office products downloading data from OBIEE (IRA) to Excel is causing some date fields to appear to download erroneously. If this happens, you will get two error messages when trying to open the Excel file and then the data in the affected date fields may appear to be numbers.
To resolve this:
- In Excel, highlight the affected column.
- Right click on the column and click Format Data from the menu that appears. The date field shows as "General" data type.
- Click Date for the data type. The data will display as expected, with the correct date displaying in the Excel sheet.
Note: This does not happen with all Date Fields coming from IRA. It only seems to happen when the date field has a timestamp attached in the actual data (e.g., “9/15/15 12:00:00 AM”) but where we have altered the data format in the IRA report itself to only show the date in this field.
This issue has been reported to Microsoft and to Oracle.
The two error messages that may pop up when opening Excel are:
#1 - "Excel found unreadable content in [the name of the file being downloaded]. Do you want to recover the contents of this workbook? If you trust the source of this workbook, click Yes."
#2 - After clicking Yes, the second message will read "Excel was able to open the file by repairing or removing the unreadable content. . ." Click close and your sheet will open and then you can change the data format on the affected date columns as described above.