Opening the aircraft register data file in Excel

Opening the aircraft register data file directly in Excel will cause Excel to choose the data format for each cell automatically. This may cause serial numbers to be converted to dates or exponential format numbers. Postcodes with a leading zero will also be affected. There may be other conversion errors as well.

If you need to view the data in Excel and require correct conversion of all fields, the following steps may help.

Open a new, blank spreadsheet in Excel
Click on the ‘Data’ menu in the top tool bar
Select ‘Import External Data’
Select ‘Import data’
Find and open the aircraft register file you previously downloaded. You may need to change the file type setting to "all files" rather than "text".
A data conversion dialog appears:
- Step 1 - Choose ‘Delimited’ (select ‘Next’)
- Step 2 - Choose ‘Comma’ as the delimiter, Text qualifier should be " (double quote mark) (select ‘Next’)
- Step 3 - Find and select the Serial Number column (column 5). Change the data format from ‘General’ to ‘Text’.
- Step 4 - Find and select the regholdPostcode column (column 18). Change the data format from ‘General’ to ‘Text’.
- Step 5 - Find and select the regopPostcode column (column 26). Change the data format from ‘General’ to ‘Text’.
- Step 6 - Find and select the Propmodel column (column 36). Change the data format from ‘General’ to ‘Text’.
- Step 7 - Choose ‘Finish’ and the data should appear in your spreadsheet with correctly formatted dates. (If you are asked where you want to put the data, select ‘Existing worksheet’.

There may be other fields affected as well but these are the ones that have been drawn to our attention.

If you have questions about using the data file contact the Aircraft Register team. We will post the answers to common questions on this page as they come in.