Excel reformatting csv files

[morgan.murray]

Help,

We are using an template in a csv format to populate an online data repository. Unfortunately this system is specific re date and cell formats, Dates must ne either be a date and time stamp like 2015-04-13T13:27:00Z or an America date 2015-04-13 and the field must be in be a " text" format.

When we use excel open an existing template or re-open these csv files it changes the format settings so you have to re-edit the details each time to meet the formatting requirements

The question is can we stop this so we can avoid having to re edit the files when they are opened by excel?

Regards
Morgan

[newdoverman]

CSV files are TEXT files so all content is text. When you re-open a CSV file in Excel, it tries to format the content to match Excel formats.

Why use Excel to open these files when you know that the formats will be changed? Why not use a text editor, save as .txt then change the extension to .csv ? Your formatting will remain intact.

If you really want to use Excel, this will get your data into Excel without a change of format.

Open the CSV file in Notepad or other text editor.
Open Excel and select all the cells and format as TEXT.

Go to the text editor and select and copy all the text.

Paste into Excel.
Click on the Data Tab, Text to Columns, Delimited, Comma.
Select each field in turn and select the TEXT button.
Click Finish.

Do you editing and save as a CSV file.