Stop Excel from automatically converting certain t

Question

Does anyone happen to know if there is a token I can add to my csv for a certain field so Excel doesn't try to convert it to a date?

I'm trying to write a .csv file from my application and one of the values happens to look enough like a date that Excel is automatically converting it from text to a date. I've tried putting all of my text fields (including the one that looks like a date) within double quotes, but that has no effect.

Answer 1

EASIEST SOLUTION I just figured this out today.

• Open in Word
• Replace all hyphens with en dashes
• Save and Close
• Open in Excel

Once you are done editing, you can always open it back up in Word again to replace the en dashes with hyphens again.

Answer 2

Its not the Excel. Windows does recognize the formula, the data as a date and autocorrects. You have to change the Windows settings.

"Control Panel" (-> "Switch to Classic View") -> "Regional and Language Options" -> tab "Regional Options" -> "Customize..." -> tab "Numbers" -> And then change the symbols according to what you want.

http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/enable-disable-auto-convert-number-date-t3791902.html

It will work on your computer, if these settings are not changed for example on your customers' computer they will see dates instead of data.

Answer 3

I do this for credit card numbers which keep converting to scientific notation: I end up importing my .csv into Google Sheets. The import options now allow to disable automatic formatting of numeric values. I set any sensitive columns to Plain Text and download as xlsx.

It's a terrible workflow, but at least my values are left the way they should be.

Answer 4

In my case, "Sept8" in a csv file generated using R was converted into "8-Sept" by Excel 2013. The problem was solved by using write.xlsx2() function in the xlsx package to generate the output file in xlsx format, which can be loaded by Excel without unwanted conversion. So, if you are given a csv file, you can try loading it into R and converting it into xlsx using the write.xlsx2() function.

Answer 5

I know this is an old question, but the problem is not going away soon. CSV files are easy to generate from most programming languages, rather small, human-readable in a crunch with a plain text editor, and ubiquitous.

The problem is not only with dates in text fields, but anything numeric also gets converted from text to numbers. A couple of examples where this is problematic:

• ZIP/postal codes
• telephone numbers
• government ID numbers

which sometimes can start with one or more zeroes (0), which get thrown away when converted to numeric. Or the value contains characters that can be confused with mathematical operators (as in dates: /, -).

Two cases that I can think of that the "prepending =" solution, as mentioned previously, might not be ideal is

• where the file might be imported into a program other than MS Excel (MS Word's Mail Merge function comes to mind),
• where human-readability might be important.

My hack to work around this

If one pre/appends a non-numeric and/or non-date character in the value, the value will be recognized as text and not converted. A non-printing character would be good as it will not alter the displayed value. However, the plain old space character (\s, ASCII 32) doesn't work for this as it gets chopped off by Excel and then the value still gets converted. But there are various other printing and non-printing space characters that will work well. The easiest however is to append (add after) the simple tab character (\t, ASCII 9).

Benefits of this approach:

• Available from keyboard or with an easy-to-remember ASCII code (9),
• It doesn't bother the importation,
• Normally does not bother Mail Merge results (depending on the template layout - but normally it just adds a wide space at the end of a line). (If this is however a problem, look at other characters e.g. the zero-width space (ZWSP, Unicode U+200B)
• is not a big hindrance when viewing the CSV in Notepad (etc),
• and could be removed by find/replace in Excel (or Notepad etc).
• You don't need to import the CSV, but can simply double-click to open the CSV in Excel.

If there's a reason you don't want to use the tab, look in an Unicode table for something else suitable.

Another option

might be to generate XML files, for which a certain format also is accepted for import by newer MS Excel versions, and which allows a lot more options similar to .XLS format, but I don't have experience with this.

So there are various options. Depending on your requirements/application, one might be better than another.

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Addition

It needs to be said that newer versions (2013+) of MS Excel don't open the CSV in spreadsheet format any more - one more speedbump in one's workflow making Excel less useful... At least, instructions exist for getting around it. See e.g. this Stackoverflow: How to correctly display .csv files within Excel 2013? .

Answer 6

Here is the simple method we use at work here when generating the csv file in the first place, it does change the values a bit so it is not suitable in all applications:

Prepend a space to all values in the csv

This space will get stripped off by excel from numbers such as " 1"," 2.3" and " -2.9e4" but will remain on dates like " 01/10/1993" and booleans like " TRUE", stopping them being converted into excel's internal data types.

It also stops double quotes being zapped on read in, so a foolproof way of making text in a csv remain unchanged by excel EVEN IF is some text like "3.1415" is to surround it with double quotes AND prepend the whole string with a space, i.e. (using single quotes to show what you would type) ' "3.1415"'. Then in excel you always have the original string, except it is surrounded by double quotes and prepended by a space so you need to account for those in any formulas etc.