What does this error message mean? "Error converting data type varchar to numeric"

[AAPWM]

Hello

My job is to extract data from my companies database with Crystal Reports, export that data to Excel, modify the data, save the data as "Text "tab delimited"", and upload to the database once again. Ive done this for close to a year and have never had this error message.

"Error converting data type varchar to numeric"

2255;2801
IMPORT LOG;IMPORT MAPPING INTERFACE;IMPORT MAPPINGS;SQL - CALL IMPORT ROUTINES;_DB ERROR

Can anyone help?

[code green]

I usually see this where I am using a string and a number in the same place.

A typical example would be where the data is usually a price,
but where the price is zero you are replacing with an empty string '' or something like 'No Price'

[NeoPa]

I agree. You need to look at the data. Anything that indicates which record the error message is referring to is helpful.

I would also look for a number mixed with text, especially where this is just a number in other records. For instance, a currency column may contain a value for CAD (Canadian Dollars) generally, but a value for USD or GBP (pounds sterling) may be written as '32 USD' or '57 GBP'.

[AAPWM]

Thanks people, I do have a column containing weights of certain products. Some of the weights were "0.0". I will try the upload tonight, without the weight column.

[AAPWM]

Hello,

I have found that if you hit Ctrl + Shift in excel while you are typing in a cell, this will change some of your keyboards keys to weird symbols or letters with accents. I did this once without knowing how and decided to keep working with it, all i needed was a quotation sign. I do believe that is what gave me the error message.

Thanks again

[NeoPa]

I can't say I know much about Ctrl-Shift usage with the keyboard, but I do know that some characters that look like quotes are often inadvertently used in place of the correct ones, and these cause various problems.

They normally show up when code is posted in here properly in the CODE tags though. Especially if you know what you are looking for. They often find their way in when people work with code or data from within a word processor or other such software. MS Word is specifically designed to use slanted quotes if it can, to make it more human-readable. This is fine for humans, but the characters themselves are not what they appear to be, which is critical when used as data or code.