Excel spreadsheet issues with iOS 6

[dnkbro]

I upgraded to iOS 6 and I'm extremely disappointed. Overlooking the battery drain issues, auto-brightness issues, and maps debacle, one thing that is really bothering me is the issues with excel. My work sends my schedules in a excel format (.xlsx i believe) and so far and the data values for the times are not being displayed correctly. I went into my gmail on the computer and checked the spreadsheet and everything was fine. This has never been an issue with iOS 5. Is anyone else experiencing this issue?

 

[dnkbro]

anyone?

 

[KeepCalmPeople]

Are you opening the file in the Numbers app?

I don't think I could help without getting a copy of the file to open myself, which is obviously impossible.

 

[dnkbro]

I'm opening the file through the email (it's an .xlsx document). It is whatever default spreadsheet app that's on the phone (I never downloaded anything new). I downgraded to iOS 5 and it's opening the documents correctly so for sure this is an iOS 6 issue.

 

[Dassvenster]

I'm having exactly the same problems. I get an email sent to me each day with an Excel attachment (though older .xls in my case). I used to be able to view the spreadsheet in iOS 5, but now I can't in iOS 6. It was such a useful feature - why on Earth would they remove it?

 

[MyGigaHurts]

Same issue with Excel attachments

Also experiencing issues with Excel (xls & xlsx) attachments since updating to iOS 6. The file will open, but with missing fields and formatting. Thus, important data on the file is either missing or incorrect. Like the others here, the issue is with a work schedule that my wife emails to herself so she can glance at it when away from her PC. It appears that the date/time formatting is not being displayed correctly, so every field with a date/time value is being displayed as [$-000]h:mm AM/PM.

 

[JnDRader]

Having the same issue. Excel spreadsheet emailed daily no longer opens with the default viewer. A little frustrating.

 

[denaliOnDubs]

I'm having this issue also. Sorry to bump an older thread... but did anyone ever find a way to solve this issue? I've tried various free apps with no luck.

 

[davidharris]

Issue still exists!

Our users with iOS 6.x see Excel spreadsheets that have date fields display as currency fields instead. Ugh!

 

[muledoggie]

I have the same problem, and since the viewer capability of IOS is apparently the issue, dropbox doesn't render dates in spreadsheets well either.

 

[bpphillips5]

I am not a Mac user, so I apologize if this is less than helpful to a lot of you. That said, I have experienced this same problem when I e-mail my work schedule (in Excel format) home for my wife to look at on her iPad.

My solution is to rewrite the Excel file, using VBScript, and convert the date-cells to a text string representing the date value (e.g. "AUG 20").

I realize that a lot of you may not have A) access to a Windows machine in order to run VBScript; and/or B) the requisite skills to write the code to carry off the transformation, but for those that do, here is an example of what I'm talking about:

Note: This is copied straight from the code that I use, so your loop values will undoubtedly be different.

dim j
dim oExcel
dim tmp

set oExcel = CreateObject("Excel.Application")

'Convert date-formatted cells to text because Apple's Excel viewer doesn't handle dates properly
for j = 15 to 2 step -1
	'Save date value
	tmp = oExcel.Cells(3,j)

	'Set format = "text"
	oExcel.Cells(3,j).NumberFormat = "@"

	oExcel.Cells(3,j) = Day(tmp) & " " & ucase(MonthName(Month(tmp),true))
next

oExcel.quit

set oExcel = nothing

Brian