Leading Zeroes in a CSV

Posted by Matthew on January 03, 2002 12:06 PM

I have written an ASP page that downloads a CSV file of data. This ASP page is used by hundreds of people in my company. Most of them are not tech savvy.
In this data are some IDs that should be treated as Text but, when the file is opened in Excel, they are treated as numbers. Leading zeroes are dropped.

I have tried to enclose the IDs in double quotes, but the leading zeroes are still dropped.

I have tried starting each field with a single quote, in an attempt to alert Excel that the field is text, but the single quote appears in the cell with the actual value of the ID. That is unacceptable.

Is there any way to "trick" Excel into treating a numeric field as text - without displaying unwanted characters in the cell? The solution MUST involve a CSV file being opened in Excel. Someone suggested I use XML, which is all fine and good - but my tech savvy users would have a heart attack.

Thanks for your time,

Posted by Damon Ostrander on January 03, 2002 1:05 PM

Hi Matthew,

To get Excel to recognize the numeric data in the .csv file as text you have to, during the third step of the import process, designate the field that contains these data as Text rather than General data. When you get to the Step 3 dialog, simply click on the column head (labelled General), and then select the Text option button.

Damon