Sometimes the Occurence ID will get written as exponent #.###E#

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1

In which Wildbook did the issue occur? Flukebook

What operating system were you using? (eg. MacOS 10.15.3) Windows 11

What web browser were you using? (eg. Chrome 79) Chrome

What is your role on the site? (admin, researcher, etc) admin

What happened? During bulk upload the occurence ID gets put into scientific notation e.g. #.####E# but its really just a number in the upload (but its input as a string column as required)

What did you expect to happen? for the number to show up as entered

What are some steps we could take to reproduce the issue? This has happneed before and the only thing that fixes it is a lot of paste and unformatting in excel. There must be a flukebook side fix

If this is a bulk import report, send the spreadsheet to services@wildme.org with the email subject line matching your bug report

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Hi @ShaneGero

We’ve seen this before and you’re right; it is an issue with the way Excel formats its cells. It looks like validating entries for the occurrence ID field is already an accepted feature request, though it’s specifically in relation to preventing duplicate IDs: Bulk upload - occurrence ID validation

There are faster ways to get Excel to cooperate that I’ve found helpful for past troubleshooting:

Even though this page says the steps will fix dates, it works for the randomly included decimals and symbols, too.