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What do you mean "spit out"? Is it being put into a new open workbook, an existing open workbook, or is it being saved as a file?
And I don't mean to suggest I know better than the person actually dealing with the situation (I hate when people do that), but if you can do it manually, it can be automated.
The program generates a report for us once a month. It can be generated as an excel file or as another file type which we cannot use. When it generates the excel file it breaks a bunch of numbers that are used often and all throughout our data as excel thinks they are dates. When we try and reverse any of those numbers in all the many ways people have recommended the data never goes back all correctly. So I have to manually replace the data cell by cell afterwards.
We are unable to preemptively format any settings in excel to prevent this from happening.
There once was a beta version of excel that had the exact feature we need (excel leaves all data untouched unless told otherwise), but for some godforsaken reason Microsoft got rid of that setting.
This is probably a dumb question, and there's likely a very good reason why this can't be done, but can you not generate an Excel file from one of the other formats yourself? E.g. have the program output a CSV and write a python script that parses it into an excel file. That way you might have more control over the generated Excel and maybe be able to do it automatically.
He can also use an alternative to excel like OpenOffice or libreoffice, I don't know why would they would use excel when it causes issues.
Maybe the output to managers needs to be Excel for some reason, e.g. there's some processing afterwards with another closed tool.
Must be the export into an Excel file that breaks it. By that point, an alternative reader won't help.
I think you mean export to xls, also each program will have a different way for exporting. It might be that the way excel does it breaks it.