Why are my fields being formatted as numbers when using an Excel template?

When building documents from Microsoft Excel templates in ContactsLaw, you may find that file numbers are formatted as if they were decimal numbers, or that number formatting rules seem to be ignored in the resulting document.

In order to maximise compatibility with Excel's formulae and other features, ContactsLaw will try to interpret the value of each field and apply the corresponding cell formatting for "Number", "Currency" or "Date". This will only occur if the cell format in the template is set to "General" (the default format).

To preserve the format of file numbers, it is recommended that you use the "Text" format. For decimal numbers, it is preferable to set the cell format in the template than to number formatting rules; the latter are intended for document formats which do not have built-in number formatting features. This will also simplify your templates.

It is always good practice to choose a specific cell format when authoring Excel templates, rather than relying on the "General" format.