retaining text format

rhoneyman If the Automatic Data Conversion (ADC) options are generally available already (which might not be), they sit under Excel options , Data. When this feature was in the beta phase they where  stashed away in Advanced options.

I'm aware of the existence of the Lotus compatibility settings but not of the impact they may have on ADC. I don't recall that these were ever checked in my set-up and Excel persisted to automatically convert data upon import, before I could select the new ADC options.

By the way, we are talking about data conversion here, not just 'date entries being converted'. That is, dropping leading zeroes, transforming very large numbers or digits surrounding the letter E into scientific notation, or for example converting a text like "18/04/5405" to a date.