Force text that looks like currency to remain text

[Laurence Lombard]

I live in South Africa that uses the letter R as our currency symbol. I have
a comma delimited file with R99 as text in a cell but Excel keeps changing
it to currency. If I precede it with a ' as in 'R99 then it interprets it as
text, but when I save it as a CSV file and reopen it, the value has become
currency again. I acces the CSV file with another application and Excel
chages it from R99 to R 99 (space intended but not desired).

I did not necessarily want to disable the currency symbol as it it useful
other workbooks.

Any help
Thanks
Laurence

 

[Debra Dalgleish]

If you change the csv extension to txt, the Import Wizard will start
when you open the file in Excel.

In step 3 of the Import wizard, in the Data preview pane, select the
column that contains the R99 text
Set its Column data format to text, then click Finish.

 

[Dave Peterson]

That sounds like a confusing situation.

If your data is laid out columnwise, you could rename your .CSV file to .TXT and
then when you open it, you can specify each field as General or Text.

or...

Is there anyway you could convert your R33 (text version) to r33 (lower case
r). Excel seems to distinguish nicely between r33 and R33 (text v. currency)
when opening CSV files.