PowerPivot interprets numbers as dates

[citwork]

Hi all

I have just recently discovered PowerPivot and are pretty excited about it's potential. But... It also gives me some headaches!

I have a csv-file containing round 300 thousand lines. I have successfully loaded it into PowerPivot several times, until I began to expand the number of columns. The new columns contains decimal numbers (nnnnn.nn) as do some of the existing columns. But somehow PowerPivot wants the new columns to be dates. It has no effect when I change the datatype for the column in PowerPivot and it has no effect to start from scratch in a new spreedsheet. I have loaded the file into a normal spreedsheet and this is handles 100% correct by Excel.

Googling the problem led me to the schema.ini file. I have constructed a schema.ini file and PowerPivot recognizes this file allright. Unfortunately the import fails with a new error:
System.NullReferenceException: Objektreferencen er ikke indstillet til en forekomst af et objekt (in danish!)

Any suggestions?

 

[Andrew Poulsom]

Maybe this will help you:

http://www.powerpivot-info.com/forum/4-powerpivot-and-dax-forum/160-date-import-from-text-file

 

[citwork]

Hi Andrew

That was quick! Thank you.

The little trick worked - I can now import the rows in PowerPivot. But I can't see them! PowerPivot Tells me that it has successfully imported 272,256 rows. I can see all the columns, but they contain no data.