If you change the file extension to TXT, then when you open the file you'll
see the Text Import Wizard. It will let you specify that this column is text
rather than a date.

On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 19:17:02 -0800, "The Palewhale" <The
wrote:

I have a column in CSV data that contains "03/04" which is an Australian
financial posting year. Our finacial year is July 1st to June 30th. When I
open this CSV file with Excel it interprets this data as a date - 3rd April.
To make matters worse, it adds 2004 as a year, so changing the column to Text
gives me 38080 not 03/04. Is there a setting somewhere that can tell Excel
NOT to interpret data fields.