Data type issues faced while exporting report from cognos to excel

Question

When I export report from cognos to excel 2002 or 2007 format I want to convert the numbers to numeric data type.

I face issues after exporting when i try to find sum of certain columns it has values as

23,3456| 2356| 45,686.89| 20.00

due to this comma or other characters its taking the columns as text or some other data type. so I manually convert to numeric data type and then apply summation functions. Need a solution to avoid this.

I want the decimal values to be decimal and numeric values to be numeric.

Answer 1

The region/language settings of your Cognos install does not match the region/language settings of Excel (which is inherited from Windows). The best solution is to adjust Windows settings to match Cognos or vice-versa.

Alternatively in the report in question you can override the Data Format of the values by selecting them and choosing Data Format from the properties window. From there you can adjust various settings such as forcing a specific data type as well as other options such as whether to use a comma separator.