String of Text Converts into a Date ???

Are you:
i. exporting an Excel file to a CSV,
ii. importing a CSV into Excel, or
iii. just trying to view the CSV file (and you end up using Excel to view it)?

Don't trust what Excel says the CSV file has in it. Open it up in a Text Editor, like NotePad to view it to see what is actually has in it (text files are not stored with any formatting, however when you use Excel to view a CSV file, Excel makes some assumptions as to what formats columns should have).

If you need to import the CSV into Excel, instead of opening it directly into Excel, open a blank Excel sheet and open using Data | Import External Data | Import Data and browse to your file. This will invoke the Import Wizard, where you can specify the format of each column. Make sure the column in question is formatted as Text instead of General or Date.

Thank you for the reply.

After exporting a CSV file from the admin panel of a website, I try to open it up in Excel. In Excel, those model numbers convert into dates.

I opened up that same CSV file in Notepad and the model numbers are correct (i.e., not dates).

Then I tried the following process: I tried opening up a blank worksheet; formatting the entire worksheet to text; then importing external data from text; for Column Data Format, I select Text and then do the import. The Result: those model numbers that were supposed to be formatted to text throughout the whole process were converted into dates ??????

Then I experimented by opening up the CSV in Notepad; replacing the hyphen of one model number from "-" to "?-?" ; copy-pasting the resulting text file into an Excel worksheet.; finding the one cell with the "?-?"; formatting it as text; and then using Find-Replace to remove the extra "??". That didn't work either as it was again converted into a date. (Although, by manually going into that cell and backspacing those 2 ?s the cell remained as text and did not convert into a date; but I have a few thousand rows - way too many to do manually.)

How can I get Excel to open up these model numbers as text and not as dates ???? (By the way, I am using Office 2007 if that helps.)

I just want to verify how exactly are you importing the CSV file into Excel. You should go to the Data menu and use Get External Data, then Import Text File
(Note: it may be this, or what I posted in the previous post -- it depends on what version of Excel you are using; either way you will begin under the Data menu).

Then after you browse to your file and the Import Wizard is invoked, on Step 3, make sure you choose the Text format for THAT column (note that if it is not your first column, you will need to cycle through and select the appropriate column -- if you just select Text on the first column, that is the only column it will format that way, and it won't format the column you are trying to fix).

If you do this, Excel should NOT re-format that column as Date. It will appear just as it does in NotePad.

I just tried that and the first time it did indeed re-format it.

Then I tried it again and in the External Data Properties, I changed the default setting by unchecking "Preserve Cell Formatting".

That worked !!!

Thanks for the help.