Floating point issue from Excel or Clipboard to Ple4Win

[shaswin]

Affected version: Ple4Win v4.3.1 build 15032

When one imports data from Excel to Ple4Win, Ple4Win doesn't imports the whole double digit value. The floating point value is trimmed at the 5th digit. I have attached an example Excel file with maximum 9 digits.

Value of Cell C3 of the POLYDIF sheet is 94833.25568275
In Ple4Win the first DX_N value is 94833.25568.
Somehow the values after the 94833.25568 are cleared. This means that my calculated values in Excel doesn't match with Ple4Win, which means that points are not in the same location as calculated in Excel.

This issue also happens when copy manually with (Ctr+C) from cell C3 value and paste (Ctrl+V) it into Ple4Win. So the values are also trimmed when the Clipboard is used.

This is a small issue, but at disconituity points this can be issue because it is not exactly on the node/AX-L/AX-LP as calculated in Excel due to this isconsistency which can give stress peak points in the calculations for example when one uses slack points.

[P Herwig MSc]

Hi Shaswin,

On a manual copy fom Excel it is Excel that limits the significance uploaded to the clipboard based on the cell's number formatting.

If you would paste your value from Excel to - for example - Notepad, you will also observe only 10 significant figures are copied. In this case the Number format in Excel is set as 'General'. If you change the number format to 'Number' having 8 decimal places and retry the copy paste action, all 8 digits will be included.

In Ple4Win version 4.3.1 the Excel Import functionality uses the Excel number formatting information. From the upcoming release onwards, the Import functionality will take the full value regardless of the number formatting.

[shaswin]

Hi Shaswin,

On a manual copy fom Excel it is Excel that limits the significance uploaded to the clipboard based on the cell's number formatting.

If you would paste your value from Excel to - for example - Notepad, you will also observe only 10 significant figures are copied. In this case the Number format in Excel is set as 'General'. If you change the number format to 'Number' having 8 decimal places and retry the copy paste action, all 8 digits will be included.

In Ple4Win version 4.3.1 the Excel Import functionality uses the Excel number formatting information. From the upcoming release onwards, the Import functionality will take the full value regardless of the number formatting.

Nice to see that you are implementing the full the NumberFormat into Ple4Win.

If I use Cells(i, n).NumberFormat = "0.000000000" for all numbers the following error appears in Ple4Win when I import the Excel file, see screenshot below:

[attachment=751]

This issue happen because Ple4Win uses hardcoded integer number values. It happens also with hardcoded Single digit values (IEEE 32-bit, 4-byte). Numberformatting with a floating point with (double digit precision) are not always accepted when one imports from Excel from the Ple4Win menu.

I think. if a value can only be an Integer value/String value/Single digit value/Double digit value/etc then this should be mentioned in the Data description/conditions in the helpfile of the input tables.

[P Herwig MSc]

Hi Shaswin,

Happy to mention this will no longer be an issue in the upcoming version, as it will import the value regardless of the applied number format.

[shaswin]

Thanks for the confirmation.