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When creating an Oracle BI Publisher rdf template in Microsoft Word, with intended output to Microsoft Excel; is there a way to format numbers as text so that leading zeroes don't dissappear? I would like to print out telephone numbers and they have values such as 0215551234; where I want the leading zero to show. In BI Publisher this shows as 215551234.

Superdooperhero
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2 Answers2

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In BI Publisher properties for the field check Force LTR option

enter image description here

or you can put the following in form field help text

<fo:bidi-override direction="ltr" unicode-bidi="bidi-override"><?YOUR_TEL_FIELD?></fo:bidi-override>
Sebastian Cichosz
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  • Thanks, that seems to work. Is the direction="ltr" definitely needed? Is there any way to specify the formatting, so that you can format dates or numbers the way you want them? – Superdooperhero Sep 04 '13 at 09:57
  • I think that [BIP documentation](http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28280_01/bi.1111/e22254/create_rtf_tmpl.htm#numb_date_rtf) will be the first place to look for. The problem is that RTF -> Excel sometimes doesn't work as it should. – Sebastian Cichosz Sep 04 '13 at 11:01
  • Turns out this solution doesn't work very well, since it inserts hidden question marks around the value; which makes interfaces fail. – Superdooperhero Jan 13 '17 at 08:48
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I'm not sure if you still need this, but here is an example of a solution I found on the Internet (and it's on SQL level so you don't need to worry about complicated XML codes):

SELECT '="' || q.item_code || '"' excel_display_item_code
FROM   (SELECT '00005689' item_code FROM DUAL
        UNION
        SELECT '00000012' item_code FROM DUAL
        UNION
        SELECT '01345677' item_code FROM DUAL) q;
dimcookies
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paz
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