Originally posted by Spikeles...

I ordered a software product last year from a company in the US. They're a great company with really smart people who produce really good software.

So imagine my surprise when I recieved the product that had the first line of the address as "Jan-48". Well, I thought to myself, I live at unit 1 number 48, which I entered as 1/48, so somewhere along the line their software translated it into a date. Fortunately, the postman in my area knows me and knew who to deliver it to. I let the company know, and they said they'd let their ordering department know.

Three weeks ago I ordered another product. Again, the same problem with the address. Again, I sent a letter to them. This is their reply:

The explanation is a little lengthy, but when we send our orders for fulfillment, the information is sent in an Excel file. Excel sees your "1/482" and wants to convert it to a date.

You can avoid this by entering your street address on one line: 1/48 YourStreetHere St.

I don't know what boggles me more — that they use Excel, or that they don't know how to format cells in Excel so that they use the "text" type.

Alternatively, as LordOfThePigs points out, he could just stick an apostrophe at the beginning of his address. DaveK added that this isn't the first time (or the worst time) that Excel's automatic date formatting has caused problems.

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