I think you may well be confusing yourself by reimporting the csv into
Excel. My guess is that the csv contains the value you wanted it to
contain. Remember that the csv is a *text* file. Open it with something
like notepad to check. If you are seeing something unwanted, it is probably
because you have allowed Excel to open the csv using its default options.
If you do want to read the csv into Excel, do it either by changing the
extension from csv to txt or by using Excel's Data/ Import External Data;
in either of these cases the text import wizard will allow you to specify
the column format as text if that is what you want.
--
David Biddulph

"cinnie" wrote in message
...
hi to all

This is simple I'm sure, but it sure is stumping this new user. I
frequently get .xls sheets that I must save as .csv format before the data
can be loaded into a database. Here's my problem:

One of the .xls columns, called Age Group, has values like...

8, under 13, 10-12, 16+, 5-7, etc...

Even though these are formatted as 'text', I run into a conversion problem
when saving as a .csv file. The 10-12, for example, insists on changing
to
the date 12-Oct. If I then try to format this as 'text', I get 39733 of
course. How can I ensure that values like 10-12 are seen as text not
dates,
even when convering to csv format?

much thanks
--
cinnie