Handles getting modified when put in excel

[mdhutchinson]

One of the command buttons in the application I am working on exports data to a CSV file. In the data that is exported, I have several fields, one of which is for the DrawingName and another for the EntityHandle... The functionality that I built into the app allows the user to double click a line in the listbox and the application will (zoom) the user to the correct drawing and entity which the row in the list box references. I have this ‘Show entity’ functionary working well… and I am quite happy with it.

In AutoCAD and in my application's GUI, the handles show correctly as 1011E9 and 1011E2... but in the exported data in the CSV file the data reads as 1.01E+12 and 1.01E+05. Note: I am using Excel type library to do the work of exporting the data to create the CSV file… and I really don’t want to change to some other non-Excel approach.

I have yet to develop the code that will bring this data (after editing by an external enterprise application) back into my application… but when I do I need for the entity handles to remain as it was so that this zoom feature will continue to work.

The data comes from an object for which I created a Class module for with Property Let and Set Procedures. The Property’s data type for the Handle property is String, but yet in the trip to the CSV file the value of the field is getting evaluated as scientific notation because of the occurrence (apparently) of the ‘E’.

Any ideas as to how I might fix this?

[mdhutchinson]

you could improve this by sumbiting an Undo step to undo the text rotation to align the WCS ... I actually thought of this for my case also...

[mdhutchinson]

thought I should chime in here again...

I (with some help from another source) discovered another way to get excel to quit evaluating AutoCAD handles of the form ####E#.
When the handle field is written to excel, instead of writing 1011E9 , write '1011E9

"`" & Handle

this works well... but obviously... program code that reads from the excel file needs to strip the apostrophe off.

[LanKhuong]

Add a single quote before the Handle string before putting it into Excel:

Range("A1") = "'014E12"

Excel will treat this as text.