On Apr 24, 12:11*pm, paddy wrote:
Hi, this is John, who posted the original question.
*I appreciate your replies, but none of you are really
getting the gist of the problem.

18 months later, and you are still grousing about the same problem!

I don't know who you think you are talking to, but participants in
these newsgroups have nothing to do with Microsoft and its product
policies.

AFAIK, Microsoft employees never participated in the Usenet
newsgroups, which is where your current posting went directly.

Even in the Microsoft Discussion Groups where you posted your original
complaint, there was never very much, if any, participation by
Microsoft product developers and planners.

The voting mechanism was a joke. I doubt that Microsoft ever paid
attention to it; and if they did, it took far too many votes for them
to act on a suggestion.

If you still teach Microsoft Office at the college level, you should
be aware by now that Microsoft has discontinued the original
Discussion Groups, which were mirrored in these Usenet newsgroups.
The DG has been replaced by the Answers Forums at
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/...ry/officeexcel.
The Answers Forums are no longer distributed to other systems, notably
not the Usenet newsgroups.

But don't get your hopes up. Even though I have seen some (very
little) participation by Microsoft support engineers, I doubt that
they will take any feedback back to the Excel development team.

IMHO, Microsoft does not care about its customers. I think that is
very apparent by the lack of relevant changes over the years and,
equally notable, by the number of irrelevant changes that result in a
new round of customer complaints each time.

(AFAIK, XL2010 is the first Excel version in many years in which
Microsoft implemented functionality changes specifically to address
the repeated complaints from the academic community.)

That said, of course we get the gist of the problem. We all have
suffered with it for many years. Most of us realize that we have no
influence over Microsoft, so we just live with it. There is nothing
else we can do.

Pursuant to a solution, you might look into using XML files instead of
CSV and TXT files.

I confess that I do not know much about XML files myself. But I
believe that they include tags that can correctly type text data so
that it is preserved.

Of course, whether or not Excel creates XML files with the correct
data types and whether or not Excel correctly handles data type tag
when a file is opened is another story. I don't know. I am skeptical
simply because Microsoft is Microsoft.

Another possible alternative: Open Office. Normally, I would not
recommend it as a matter of principle. I have no direct experience;
but based on comments from users, Open Office is not entirely
compatible with MS Excel.

But I do believe that I've read users comments that lead me to suspect
that Open Office preserves text data in CSV files.

Sounds like fodder for research by a professor who teaches Microsoft
Office. Good luck with that!

PS: __I__ can read, and I do note that you said quite clearly that
since "the data can be very different from one download to another, i
can't even use a macro to accomplish this" ;-).