Phone numbers from excel getting converted to a decimal even if the data type is V_String

Question

Hello Alteryx Community,

I've recently encountered a problem when working with excel sheets that have phone numbers in them.

In the excel sheet the phone number looks something like this 412345678 but after running it the phone number turns to something like this 4.12345678E8. And in the select tool I'm using V_String as Data Type and 255 as the Size. It doesn't do that to all the phone numbers though but just some of them which is weird. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

joaz_flores999 · Answer

I think I may have found what's causing the issue but I'm not sure why it's doing that.

So I tried recreating it using a google sheet since that's where the raw files come from.

After downloading the google sheet it converts to an excel file in my computer. And uploading that to an Alteryx workflow it gives the error.

Here is the data type in the select tool.

A solution I have found is to just convert the excel column into text format. That seems to have solved the issue. But I was wondering why it happened in the first place?

Peachyco · Answer

Also make sure that the dataset is correct in Excel itself. Excel is notorious for displaying data one way and storing it in another way. Like, the cell might be showing you "412345678" when it's actually stored as "4.12345678E8".

caltang · Answer

Please provide relevant data to this use case, and kindly provide your criteria in as much detail as possible. If you have a workflow built halfway, kindly export that over as well.