B/S copy to clipboard "-"

When I C-T-C from a B/S report and paste into excel blank cells which should be zero are filled with a “-” which excel does not recognize as being a number. This does not happen when I do this with the trail balance report which has an empty cell when the value is zero. Am I missing something? Thanks.

Several points:

  • The cells you describe are not blank. If you look at the Balance Sheet report onscreen, zero-balance accounts do not show zeroes; they show hyphens. This convention is used many places in the program. So the copy/paste operation is copying and pasting exactly what is in the report.
  • Trial balances do not have empty cells because a value is zero. They have empty cells when there is no content. That is a big difference. The Trial Balance report is the processed result of computations on all debits and credits during a period. If a non-zero net debit or credit exists for a given account, it is included in the report. If not, nothing is included for that account. A blank in a column for an account is not equivalent to a zero. It is a display of nothing. On the other hand, the Net Profit (Loss) line is computed from displayed debits and credits. (Notice that values on that line are not clickable.) It always displays either a net debit or net credit; the other column always contains a hyphen, which copies as a hyphen.
  • If you do not want the zero-balance accounts to appear, edit the report definition and check the box to exclude them.
  • If you want the cells containing hyphens to be zeroes in Excel, do a global find-and-replace, 0 for -, checking the box (in the Find dialog box) to “Find entire cells only”. It takes only a couple seconds.

Thanks, point 4 works for me.