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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-31T00:23:35+00:00

Perhaps someone could provide some insight into a problem I have. I have a

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Perhaps someone could provide some insight into a problem I have.

I have a SQL Server database which receives information every hour and is updated from a stored procedure using a Bulk Insert. This all works fine, however the end result is to pull this information into Excel.

Establishing the data connection worked fine as well, until I attempted some calculations. The imported data is all formatted as text. Excel’s number formats aren’t working so I decided looking at the table in the database.

All the columns are set to varchar for the Bulk Insert to work so I changed a few to numeric. Refreshed in Excel and the calculations worked.

After repeat attempts I’ve not been able to get the Bulk Insert to work, even generating a format file with bcp it still returned errors on the insert. Could not convert varchar to numerical, after some further searching it was only failing on one numerical column which is generally empty.

Other than importing the data with VBA and converting it like that or adding zero to every imported value so Excel converts it.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Thanks for the replies I had considered using =value() in Excel but wanted to try avoid the additional formulas.

    I was eventually able to resolve my problem by generating a format file for the Bulk Insert using the bcp utility. Though getting it to generte a file proved tricky enough below is an example of how I generated it.

    At an elevated cmd:

    C:\>bcp databasename.dbo.tablename format nul -c -x -f outputformatfile.xml -t, -S localhost\SQLINSTANCE -T

    This generated an xml format file for the specific table. As my table had two additional columns which weren’t in the source data I edited the XML and removed them. They were uniqueid and getdate columns.

    Then I changed the Bulk Insert statement so it used the format file:

    BULK INSERT [database].[dbo].[tablename]
FROM 'C:\bulkinsertdata.txt'
WITH (FORMATFILE='C:\outputformatfile.xml',FIRSTROW=3)

    Using this method I was able to use the numeric and int datatypes successfully. Going back to Excel when the data connection was refreshed it was able to determine the correct datatypes.

    Hope that helps someone!

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