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Russ Suter

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Pad imported text with trailing zeros

I'm importing some text from an excel spreadsheet and I need to make sure a certain field is 16 characters long. Sometimes, the excel spreadsheet only has 14 characters in it. In this case, I just need to pad the text with trailing zeros. How can I do this?
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Patrick Matthews
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two methods

1. Use a temp table to hold the data and then use a select query to insert the data
2. Directly Query from the Excel sheet
http://sequelserver.blogspot.com/2006/04/update-table-from-excel-sheet-using.html
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ksaul

After the import you could run an update like:

first,

SELECT field, LEFT(field + '0000000000000000', 16)
FROM table
WHERE LEN(field) < 16

if that looks good then,

UPDATE table
SET field = LEFT(field + '0000000000000000', 16)
WHERE LEN(field) < 16