but importing and exporting the data so much was causing variables to be reformatted and it doesn't make sense.
When you read in an Excel file you cannot specify the types or guarantee them. So one workaround is to export the file to a text file so you can specify the types and formats explicitly. This ensures the rest of your code will work as the types are what you expect. This is especially true if the file structure and column orders are changing from month to month.
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