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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TIKA-3544?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=17411774#comment-17411774
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Nick Burch commented on TIKA-3544:
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You need to be aware that Excel itself only stored numbers-as-numbers with a
certain amount of precision (~15 digits). Any very long numbers will always
risk having data and precision lost if stored as a number in Excel. You need to
store those as strings (eg with a ' prefix) to avoid data loss
See
[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2008/04/10/understanding-floating-point-precision-aka-why-does-excel-give-me-seemingly-wrong-answers/]
for more info on this from Microsoft that you may wish to share with the
people generating your spreadsheets with the risk of data loss
> Extraction of long sequences of digits from Excel spreadsheets using Tika
> 1.20 doesn’t yield the expected results
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Key: TIKA-3544
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TIKA-3544
> Project: Tika
> Issue Type: Bug
> Components: parser
> Affects Versions: 1.20
> Reporter: Jitin Jindal
> Priority: Major
> Attachments: Credit Card Numbers.xlsx
>
>
> If an Excel spreadsheet contains a long sequence of digits, such as a credit
> card number, Tika 1.13 will emit the said sequence in scientific notation.
> For example, the credit card number “6011799905775830” is extracted from the
> attached spreadsheet as 6.480195344642784E15, which clearly is not the
> desired output.
> I think the impact of this issue is significant. There’s plenty of
> information that can no longer be reliably extracted from spreadsheets. Think
> credit card numbers, telephone numbers and product identifiers to name a few.
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