How to preserve leading zeroes when exporting data from TIBCO Spotfire

Product:TIBCO Cloud Spotfire
Versions:All

Summary:
This article explains a couple methods to preserve leading zeroes when exporting data from Spotfire.

Details:
Some data is numeric with leading zeroes (for example "0001234" that will be truncated when opened in a program such as Microsoft Excel.  If the data is opened in a text editor like Notepad, the leading zeroes are still present which shows that Spotfire is exporting the data correctly and it is just the destination program that is removing the leading zeros during formatting.

Resolution:

One way to handle this data is to change the Data Type in Spotfire to 'String'.  Click on Data > Transform Data and select 'Change data types' to make this change.

Changing the data type in Spotfire might not be desired, so if the data needs to remain numeric, then alternatively this Microsoft article gives suggestions on how to configure Excel to retain the leading zeroes when opening a .csv file:

• Keeping leading zeros and large numbers