dropping leading zero's from .csv file

[Colin Johnson]

I've seen a couple of posts here with similar problems but
the proposed solutions will not work for my situation.

I have a third-party program which generates Comma-
Delimited (csv) files. Some of the data in these files
has, and requires, leading zero's. On occasion there will
be a minor error in the generation of these files am I
will be required to manually correct the data. And this is
where the problem occurs...if I open the file with Excel
to take advantage of it's Find/Replace functions, Excel
promptly drops all leading zero's. I can use Notepad and
it retains the data structure but is much more difficult
to find the data that needs changing.
Is there a way to cause Excel to default the cell format
to 'Text' rather than 'General' when opening, not
creating, a file? I know I could set a style within Excel
or several other things but these only apply to files
generated by Excel, not external data.
Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[Peo Sjoblom]

You can use the text import wizard, do data>import external data,
import data, find the folder with your file, show all file types and open
the file,
now in step 3 you can select the column data format and change it to text,
then click finish.
Record a macro while you are doing this..