Sometimes when people transfer data from an AS/400 to Excel or another program they run into a some data that looks a bit like guacamole, this tends to happen when transferring numerical data.

Without getting into a lot of boring technical details “packed data fields” are the default standard for storing numerical data on AS/400s in a format known as EBCDIC. PC based computers use ASCII and so they don’t always translate across when transferred in there native formats.

The problem is when you bring that data over to the PC world it doesn’t always translate correctly to ASCII… now this only tends to occur when using the data transfer program built into Client Access and not when using an ODBC connection or other program which does the data translation for you behind the scenes.

The symptom is that when you download the data you will see letters in fields where there should be numbers from 0 through 9. To correct you simply translate these letters or characters over to the corresponding number as follows:

0 = ‘}’
1 = ‘J’
2 = ‘K’
3 = ‘L’
4 = ‘M’
5 = ‘N’
6 = ‘O’
7 = ‘P’
8 = ‘Q’
9 = ‘R’

Now thats about as easy as duck soup… but it sure can be a pain. Ultimately to “cure” this issue you will want to get at the data another way and not use the AS/400 Data Transfer portion of Client Access for this specific table, instead use ODBC and SQL query, import it as part of a printable report, etc.