When I use BR() in a Formula field to create a line break the value looks fine ion screen but when used in a report that is exported to excel the line break gets translated to "_BR_ENCODED_". 

The same thing does not happen when the report goes to Excel via the Printable View button but that can't substitute for the Export option.

One other post seemed to indicate this this was addressed way back in Winter 07' but that does not seem true now. 

The Export to CSV via reporting also replaces the line break with the "_BR_ENCODED_" test string.

Anyone know if this is a bug or SF really intended for it to work this.  Also, anyone have a work around to this problem?  Would have thought it would be more common given there is no native Address data type and lots of people would be creating formula based formatted address fields.

Thanks

We have scheduled pulls from Salesforce for a few native objects.  To show staff which recrods are slated or pulling, we have reports and dashboards available that they can access.  We then pull the data using the data loader and SOQL queries that match the report filter criteria for each object.  One criterion was that the Contact record have a value in the Phone field.

However, the report for Contacts showed about 100 more records fitting the criteria than were pulled with the data loader.  We played around extensively with both the report and query wondering what might be the difference between the two.

What we found is that the Salesforce report was showing some Contacts has having a value in the Phone field (right there in the Phone column on the report) when there was no value on the Contact record itself (when we clicked through, the Phone field was blank).

Has anyone run into something like this?