Forum Discussion
Cell format changes
Excel always tries to interpret a value as a date, if possible, even if that was not your intention.
Excel cannot handle dates before the year 1900, so for example 1893-2 is treated as a text value, and hence left-aligned by default.
But it interprets 1900-2 as a date (the first of February, 1900), so it changes the format to a date format and right-aligns the value.
How to prevent that depends on what kind of file you're importing in Excel.
HansVogelaar thank you for your response. It is a report on a ERP system that is exported as csv. On other computers it exports perfectly fine but this specific one it does not. Is there a setting I can change so that Excel can read all numbers as text as a default perhaps?
Kind Regards
Ryno
And there is no need to change the file extension to ".txt" first.
Simply click Data > From Text to open the Import Text File dialog box.
- Hi Joe
Thank you very much. I tried this method and it seems to work great.
Thank you for responding.
Kind Regards
Ryno
Change the extension to .txt.
If you open the file in Excel, it'll start the Import Text Wizard.
In the last step of this wizard, you can specify that the column with values such as 1900-2 must be imported as Text.
