Afternoon,

While I not necessarily brand new to Excel I've honestly never come across an issue quite like this, so hoping perhaps someone else has had a similar issue come up before.

First of all my apologies if a similar topic may have existed somewhere, but a search for terms I felt relevant to my issue did not yield any appropriate answers. Also if anything is not 100% clear, please let me know, as I am honestly not sure how exactly to word this.

The issue my coworker and I are having is as follows:

We have an Excel spreadsheet with varying data types and the first column contains various alphanumeric values. This first column has been set up with a custom format so that only 8 characters and always at least 8 characters are given (spaces/blanks for missing values). The reasoning behind this is so that when we import the files into our mainframe the data is formatted correctly.

For example:
Cell A1 may contain the value DBLDLIFE
Cell A2 may contain the value LVRVDBLLT
Cell A3 may contain the value LCS

However, they should appear as follows when imported:
DBLDLIFE
LVRVDBLL
LCS_____ (Where _ is a blank character)

The problem occurs when we import, the custom format is not saved for some reason on this first column. Other values with custom formats do save, however, they are all numeric values.

Is there no way to keep the formats on non-numerical values when saving the file as a CSV?

We have tried importing as a tabbed delimited file as well as a .txt file. A similar file was uploaded a few years ago but no one can remember if the change was done on the Excel side or on the mainframe side after import. Any assistance is much appreciated, thank you.