Without going into a discussion of design choices made by MS...

Excel provides you the option of designating any column as TEXT while
importing and leaves it alone...

Also in Notepad (or in Excel itself) you can enter '1/23 instead of 1/23.

"Jason" wrote:

If I open a CSV or Paste in certian types of text data, Excel will reformat
it based on what it thinks the data really is. I would like it to leave my
data alone unless I tell it to modify something.

For exmaple, if I type in notepad the text 1/23, and copy this and paste it
into a new spreadsheet, the result is 23-Jan ( depending on your date
settings. ) Why does it assume this value is a date, and how do I tell it to
stop?

Another example is data that looks like a number that has one or more
leading 0's. Excl seems to feel the need to strip the leading 0's to make the
value more "numberish" I guess. I don't see why it has to assume that a value
is a number just because it contains all digits, it could just as easily
belong to a set of serial numbers that occasionally have characters as well.