When downloading the Grade Center from a course in Learn, all values are contained within quotes. This can cause some issues with recognizing numeric values and, instead, they will be seen as text. Please remove the quotes from numeric values to help avoid this issue.
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Gail,
Thank you for the feedback. I understand that Excel will recognize the numbers properly, but not everyone utilizes that tool to work with CSVs. Also, I cannot find anything that says that CSV files must contain all values within double quotes:
RFC 4180 - Common Format and MIME Type for Comma-Separated Values (CSV) Files
That being the case, this is something that Blackboard could change, assuming that there are no other issues with updating it.
If the CSV format doesn't work for you, change it to tab delimited. CSV is only the default setting.
Gail,
Thank you for the suggestion; however, tab delimited files also have double quotes around all values, so that still won't address the issue that was presented to me.
Michael, why do the quotes bother you? What are you trying to do?
Gail,
I don't have any problem with the quotes. A user reached out to my team stating that the quotes around numeric values are causing a problem with whatever program or process they are trying to use with their Grade Center data. While I see the need for the quotes, especially with complex values or European numbers that contain commas instead of periods, it seems that the quotes are not, strictly, necessary. Since this is the first time I'm hearing about them causing a problem in all the years I have been working with Learn, I don't imagine this is a widespread issue or request, so I wanted to bring it to Blackboard's attention.
Michael
Michael, I too have run into people with quotation issues several times, but they quickly changed to a training issue of how to open and manipulate data. However, I will let this suggestion ride. Good luck!
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That is how all CSV files look if you open them up in a text oriented program. Open your CSV file in Excel or other spreadsheet program and you will find them as numbers ready to be used in calculations. This is nothing BB can fix, it is standard behavior of the CSV format.