Forum Discussion
Disabling Auto Conversion of Dates in Excel
Can auto conversion of dates in Excel be disabled permanently when importing a CSV? This article seems to indicate that it can, but I can't get it to work: https://insider.microsoft365.com/he-il/blog...
Bruce_Wiland Well, the trick is to NOT just click the CSV that lets Excel do some best guesses that don't always give the desired results. Even the insider feature you refer to in the link is not going to help you all the time.
Always import the CSV data with Get Data, TXT/CSV or via From Text (Legacy). That gives you full control over all data types in the data set you are working with. And not only just dates, but also numbers in different formats than your own locale, or texts that look like numbers but must remain texts.
- Thanks Riny. That's what I was afraid of. I was hoping one could totally turn off the auto conversion under all circumstances (and not let Excel make its best guesses), but, unfortunately, I guess that is not possible. It just means I will have to go through a lot more steps each time.
