Symptom
When you download a report in CSV format there are added characters for negative values.
Environment
- SAP ByDesign
- SAP Cloud for Customer
Reproducing the Issue
- Go to Business Analytics.
- Go to Design reports and find your report.
- Open your report and run it.
- Download the report in CSV format.
- Open the report in excel.
- Notice there is an extra character in cells that have a negative value.
Example:
Instead of -20 you see '-20
Cause
The reason you are seeing the extra character for minus values in your excel reports is due to a potential csv injection/security issue.
Please see the below article that explains what a csv injection is --> https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/CSV_Injection
Note this happens only for report characteristics, not key figures. Negative numerical values in characteristics should be a rare use case.
Resolution
You can manually remove the extra character from the excel report.
However if you work with reports where you frequently have negative values in characteristics, we can activate a backend switch for your system to change the escaping of quotes. This will remove the character.
If you would like to request this, please open an incident and refer to this KBA.
See Also
https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/CSV_Injection
Keywords
extra character, inverted comma, CSV, download, report, excel, , KBA , AP-RC-ANA , C4C, ByD, Travel: Analytics Tools & Frameworks , How To