Erm ... this sounds like spreadsheet and .csv questions, and you're in the Word forum.

From an information point of view, you could save yourself a lot of grief by simply telling visitors 'all linear measurements are in inches'

I vaguely remember that ### often means "the data is too wide to be displayed in this column", typically after a spreadsheet has helpfully decided to convert something like 3/4" into March 2004 or similar.

But you'll get better answers in the Excel forum <g>