Using MS Office Excel 2003. I have a data problem with populating a
set of large CSV files. Specifically, I have (some) data going into
various cells that implicitly converts to a "date value), even though
it's not.
In the CSV data, I have many values such as "FBM11", "PAT12",
"ABCO07", etc. These are displaying correctly (they're all text data),
but the value "MAY05" displays as "5-May". 8<{{
I know that I could manually change all these values by prepending a
"`" character, but this isn't feasible since I am formatting many
thousands of all data values in a program I'm developing. I tried to
insert the "`" character in all cells, but the data looks crummy for all
other values - which is unacceptable for this application. A typical
line is:
9024,"ABEL, CARTER","010164","M",4,"DCR13","MAY05","PAT12"
My question is: is there something I can insert into the CSV text for
this value that will cause Excel to treat this value as a/n text, rather
than a "date"?