Excel compatibility

[Friedman, Jason]

Hi All,

 

Would anyone be able to provide guidance as to how "Shorten column values for Excel compatibility" is supposed to work when exporting results to CSV? I still seem to get exports with too much data in cells. For example, this authors.institutions field for this work exceeds the 32,767 character limit in Excel: OpenAlex | The evolution of SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence in Canada: a time-series study, 2020–2023.

 

Thank you!

 

-Jason

 

Jason Friedman, BA, MA, MIS
he/him

Assistant Dean, Collections and Discovery

 

University of Saskatchewan

University Library

Ph: (306) 966-8114

 

I acknowledge that I live and work on Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of the Métis. We pay our respect to the First Nations and Métis ancestors of this place and reaffirm our relationship with one another.

 

[Kyle Demes]

Hi Jason (et al),

It shortens cells to 30k characters, below excel's limit. When I export the record for that work, it opens successfully. I'm wondering if you're converting or using another encoding when opening in excel that might be adding more characters to the cell? Mine is UTF-8 and works fine.

Try opening excel, then under the "Data" tab, click 'get data from text/csv' and manually choose the file to see if that works. If so, you might want to change the default encoding you open csv files with or just get data manually once in excel for these files.

Let me know though if there is another issue,

kyle

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[Friedman, Jason]

Hi Kyle,

 

That seems to have worked! I wouldn’t have thought encoding would be the issue, but looks like it. My new issue seems to be embedded new line characters (\n) (see for example: api.openalex.org/works/W4353070816). But I’m sure I’ll sort it out (though let me know if you have an easy method).

 

Thanks!

 

-Jason

 

Jason Friedman, BA, MA, MIS
he/him

Assistant Dean, Collections and Discovery

 

University of Saskatchewan

University Library

Ph: (306) 966-8114

 

I acknowledge that I live and work on Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of the Métis. We pay our respect to the First Nations and Métis ancestors of this place and reaffirm our relationship with one another.

 

From: Kyle Demes <ky...@ourresearch.org>
Sent: Monday, April 28, 2025 11:40 AM
To: Friedman, Jason <jason.f...@usask.ca>
Cc: openalex-...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [openalex-community-group] Excel compatibility

 

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