View Single Post
  #2   Report Post  
Posted to microsoft.public.excel.misc
Ron Rosenfeld Ron Rosenfeld is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 5,651
Default csv not importing numbers stored as text

On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:44:01 -0800, Jennifer
wrote:

I have a column in an excel spreadsheet that is formatted as text. The
contents are like this:

1101,1102,1103...

When I save as a csv file it then does a calculation on the numbers. What
can I do to make the csv read it as 1101,1102,1103...?


Actually, I doubt that the calculation is done when you SAVE the .csv file. If
you open the .csv file using NOTEPAD, you should see that the string is saved
as text.

The "calculation" gets done when you OPEN the .csv file in Excel.

To avoid this, rename the saved file to filename.txt

Then OPEN the file in Excel using the File/Open command. This should take you
to the Text import wizard which will give you the opportunity to format the
appropriate column as TEXT. This should avoid the conversion you mention.
--ron