I find myself working with four letter codes to identify wards and facilities at my work, inevitably I have to compare my SQL output to someone's spreadsheet. No excel, I didn't mean March 02, just give me MAR2 like I asked. Drug codes that start with a '.' are another headache, they will be auto formatted as a decimal number. Worse is when they want to put info from a spreadsheet in to the database, no one understands the need for consistent field formatting :'(