The problem is how you are openning the file.

If you double-click the icon or, from Excel, do:
File Open

then Excel tries to "help" you by dropping leading zeros. Instead:

Data Import External Data Import Data

and then tell the Wizard that the field is text. The leading zeros will be
preserved.

Another method is to rename the file something other than .csv
--
Gary''s Student - gsnu200766


"pacificwaters" wrote:

I have "00012345" in a CSV file. when i open the CSV in excel, it comes up as
"12345".

WITHOUT adding the apostrophe "'00012345" , how else can i get it to display
the zeros in front of the numbers (because it's text, not numeric)?

and the users don't want to go into format-cells each time. any global
settings for this?