Importing txt or csv file as text and only text

[Mom]

How come, after all these years and versions of Excel, an option has
not been added that will allow the user to "turn off" the default
conversion of certain text strings to numbers and dates when importing
text files?

All there seem to be are annoying work-arounds, the multi-step text-
import wizard, techniques to undo a conversion that wasn't requested
in the first place.

 

[Earl Kiosterud]

Mom,

Probably more confounding than Excel's automatically formatting stuff (often
inappropriately) is that often the user doesn't know it's done it. Words like
control-freak, anal, over-achiever come to mind. But we must make the best of it -- there
are no switches to turn it off.

Some ways of dealing with it are to record a macro while stepping through the text import
wizard, setting all the fields to text. Then just run the macro.

If you import the same stuff regularly, setting up a query is great. Data, Import External
Data - Import data. Point it to your text file, step through the text wizard, and it's
done. Now right click in your worksheet where it's imported the data, and you'll see you
can cause the import to happen again, same settings (Refresh Data). You can change the
import (Edit text import), or change the way it behaves when it does the import (Data Range
Properties). Pretty cool. Look Mom, no macro.

 

[*alan*]

Mom,

Probably more confounding than Excel's automatically formatting stuff
(often inappropriately) is that often the user doesn't know it's done it.
Words like control-freak, anal, over-achiever come to mind. But we must
make the best of it -- there are no switches to turn it off.

Some ways of dealing with it are to record a macro while stepping through
the text import wizard, setting all the fields to text. Then just run the
macro.

If you import the same stuff regularly, setting up a query is great.
Data, Import External Data - Import data. Point it to your text file,
step through the text wizard, and it's done. Now right click in your
worksheet where it's imported the data, and you'll see you can cause the
import to happen again, same settings (Refresh Data). You can change the
import (Edit text import), or change the way it behaves when it does the
import (Data Range Properties). Pretty cool. Look Mom, no macro.

Perhaps I'm either a bit dense or partially blind, but after having imported
data, no matter where I rightclick, I am unable to find what you refer to as
"Refresh Data". Likewise, features you refer to as "Edit Text Import" and
"Data Range Properties", do not appear to be available. I agree that it
seems like it would be pretty cool, but only if I could find the functions
you're referring to. I'm using Excel 2003 (perhaps that's the problem?) . .
..

 

[Dave Peterson]

Did you use:

If you import the same stuff regularly, setting up a query is great.
Data, Import External Data - Import data.

to import the data--or did you just use file|Open?

 

[*alan*]

Did you use:


to import the data--or did you just use file|Open?

Aha . . . I see. Thank you.