comma delimited (CSV) document opening issues

[jvoortman]

I have a document that was saved as a "comma delimited"
document. I am now trying to open it, and everytime it
opens, certain cells which used to have numbers in them,
now have dates in them. Can you tell excel not to use any
built informulas, before opening the document? Thanks in
advance for all help.

 

[Myrna Larson]

If the extension on the file is .csv, you can't change this. The workaround is
to change the extension to .txt. When you open a text file, you get the
options to specify the data type in each column.

 

[news-server.midsouth.rr.com]

So there's no way to have all the columns formatted as text by default?

What about registry settings, anything??

I have to open files on a constant basis and I'm seriously thinking about
trading the zeros for a non-ascii character because of this excel design
flaw (undoumented feature)

ZI

 

[Guest]

I suffer through this every day and would really like to be able to get Excel
to quit converting my SSNs and other special codes to numbers by default.

I'm ready to quit using Excel altogether and look for another spreadsheet app.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers, NB

 

[Dave Peterson]

Did you try Myrna's suggestion at the bottom of your message?