"godzooky" wrote in
message ...

i am generating a csv file that i'm importing to excel. one field is
string of numbers, which i need to display exactly as it is in csv
file. for example, if 2777380003, is in the csv file, i want to see
that exact same string in excel, not scientific notation which seems to
be the default. i tried adding a single quote in the csv file, like
this, '2777380003, but the single quote is displayed in excel until i
double click the cell. is there a way to denote no formatting inside a
csv file?

thanks

A CSV file is nothing but an odd name for a text file whose columns are
delimited (separated) by commas. Based on my experience with Excel 2000,
Excel doesn't fiddle with the data in these files when it opens them. Things
appear just as they would if you'd opened them in a text editor like
Wordpad. The trouble begins when you copy the data to an Excel worksheet.
The trick is to format the cells as Text ***before*** you copy the data into
them.