Leading Zeros in DIF Files Created in Excel Got Removed

Hi -

Is there any way to keep the leading zeros when saving data to .DIF format? I tried formatting the column as text and adding a single quote ' sign in front of the number but neither worked.

Input such like this:

Customer Number
000103 (Format = Text)
000104 (entered as '000104)

Once saved to .DIF (with warning from Excel that certain format will be stripped) and re-opened again, it becomes:

Customer Number
103
104

Thank you in advanced for your help!

The problem with the .dif file, is that the single quote mark gets converted to double quotes around the text number.

So this:

'000103

gets converted to this:

"000103"

you can open a dif file with notepad and check.

It's when you re-open the file with Excel that the quoted text gets converted from text to numbers.

The only way I can think of, is to add a double tick (two single quotes) in front of the numbers.

Like this:

''000103