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Excel VBA decimal separation

Dear Experts,

I am a relative novice in Excel VBA and would therefore appreciate some assistance.

I have some excel VBA that is effectively creating from an excel sheet a structured XML file for import into an ERP system.

The XML standards imparted by the vendor mean that it will only accept a (.) decimal separator and not a (,) comma decimal separator.

This becomes a problem when my users in Germany populate the Excel sheet as their locale is set to use (,) comma decimal separator.

I therefore wondered if it was possible via the Excel VBA to do a find and replace on these values before creating the XML, if the decimal separator in the Excel sheet was set to comma (,)??....

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated as always.

andrewssd3

You could go down the replace route, but another possibility is to use the crude functions in VBA that are not locale-aware, so Str() and Val() always work on . for decimal wherever you are. For example Val(3/2) always displays 1.5, not 1,5 even when I have my language settings set the German. Similarly, Val(3.2) always interprets the . as a decimal, which can be useful when you're reading from your xml file.

This is not ideal, but I've had to make use of it before.

andrewssd3

Correction: Str(3/2) always displays 1.5, not 1,5

RSTOCKEWLL

ASKER

I am not sure if the above is going to help, say I have a value of 600,56 entered in an excel sheet whereby the (,) is the deciaml separator, the Val() function will return this as 600 as it will ignore anything after the comma??

What I would like is for the 600,56 to return 600.56.....

Hope this makes sense....

ukerandi

check this attachment

AnswerDecimal.xls

andrewssd3

No, it does work, but it's Str you need not Val - it was probably my original post that confused you. You would use Val("23.54") to return a value from your xml. You can test this by switiching you regional and language settings to German in Control Panel and restarting Excel.

ukerandi

Check this one, you need to click on Run Button in the excel sheet,if not working your requirement please your excel sheet then i can code for you :)
AnswerDecimal.xls

plummet

Hi, do your German users use the . as a thousands separator? I seem to remember from my time working there that a number was formatted 123.000,12.

I think there's a good simple solution for this and I'll let you know when/if I think of it!

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andrewssd3

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andrewssd3

I seem to be advocating Str() very strongly now considering I originally said it was not ideal, but it also has the benefit that you do not ned to worry about the thousands separator if you are just looking at numeric values from an Excel worksheet - the thousands separator is only part of the numeric formatting for the cell and does not appear in the Cell.Value (as long as Cell.Value is a number and not a string representation of one).

RSTOCKEWLL

ASKER

Just the ticket, the Str function works perfectly.

Thanks

Rick

plummet

Hi RStockewll

If I understand your issue correctly, then adding the following function in VBA seems to work, probably if your PC is set to use US/UK number format but the spreadsheet value is in German format:

Function FormatUK(dNumber As Double) As String

    FormatUK = Format(dNumber, "currency")

End Function

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Then in the spreadsheet, simply call the function, for example to convert a number in cell C2:

=FormatUK(C2)

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I hope this helps.