CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I may be suffering from brain fog as was sure i had posted this but can't find it via searching.

(Edit - hah just found it http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,2002.msg13730.html#msg13730 and I got an answer from dave that focussed on the Price Set issue rather than the comma issue, and not sure i explained it well so here goes a second time)

when exporting a multichoice field, civiCRM puts all the data fields/choices that have data in them in to one cell separated by commas - which we understand, but it doesn't put in a comma for each and every choice.

Is it possible this can be reconfigured so that it exports a comma to represent any multichoices that are unchecked - ie for multi choice where a contact has the following information (have used x to indicate selected)

option1 x
option2
option3 x

(ie they have a check against option 1 and 3 but not two)

we currently get (option1,option3)

would be much better for then breaking the data in to columns in spreadsheets if we get an extra ',' representing the null option2 ie we would get
(option1,,option3)

Does that make sense? Should I put this in a separate thread?

I think that being able to export in this format then makes it easier to make changes in the excel and reimport it without losing already existing data. Yes we have already used a vLookup or somesuch as a workaround, but felt I should explore this with your team as I think it gets over a significant hurdle when exporting multichoice custom data, given that we can export it as one column per multichoice option. This is the next best option we can see.