My supplier's prices are a thousand times wrong
Prices from a European supplier are out by a factor of about a thousand, or occasionally by a factor of a hundred.
Why it happens
- The comma and the full stop swap jobs across locales.
- This is the dangerous class of formatting problem because both readings produce a number.
- Short values are where it does the most damage.
- A locale setting fixes it only for files that all share one locale.
What to do now
- Compare a total you already know against the imported total before trusting any of it.
- Look for cells containing both separators.
- Ask the sender for unformatted output.
- Do not fix this with find-and-replace across the column.
Next time
A number field decides from the value rather than from a setting: when a cell contains both separators, whichever one appears last is the decimal mark, so 1.234,56 and 1,234.56 both arrive as 1234.56 and two suppliers writing in two conventions can land in the same column.
Start from the vendor price list template.
Related problems
The plus sign disappeared from my phone numbersInternational phone numbers have lost their leading plus.My CSV shows é where it should show éNames and addresses are full of sequences like é, ü, or ’ where accented letters, umlauts, and apostrophes should be.My dates imported as five-digit numbersA column that should hold dates contains numbers around 45000 instead.My file has dates that do not existA date column contains days that are not on the calendar: a 31st in a thirty-day month, or a 29 February in a year that has no such day.