The following article, for advanced usage only, is applicable if you want to export report data to Excel as pure text. Depending on your program and the type of information your applicants are providing, you may need to make sure that certain values are rendered as text when you run reports on submissions. For example, your applicants may enter phone numbers with country codes starting in zero, excel might render this as a number instead of text, resulting in the preceding zeros being cut off.

A prerequisite for this article assumes that you know how to create a basic report in OpenWater.

To render your data as text, first navigate to your report and click on Advanced.

Change XLS Export option to Render as Text and click Save.

Now when you run your report, OpenWater will create an Excel sheet with all values exported as text, preventing any auto-formatting from changing your applicants' information.