Forum Discussion
Saved CSV opens with dates even when saved as text
Hi,
New to the page, have a problem with a CSV file that has hyphenated numbers which turns into dates when opened after being saved as text. How do I make sure that the changes made in the columns stay as text so it doesn't revert back to date or custom format? I know this topic is talked about in this forum and I can change it to text when I open it but the issue is I have to upload it into accounting software and think that it is defaulting when I save the file. Have tried importing the data into a CSV file and that doesn't seem to work and also got some code from an AI platform to put into the Visual Basic program to try and stop it but didn't seem to work. Any help would be much appreciated.
Brian
| 4-1000 | Income |
| 4-1025 | Income |
| Apr-00 | Income |
1 Reply
Start by disabling all the "Automatic Data Conversion" options and try again!
As a general comment, it's not wise to not open a CSV file directly in Excel as Excel will try to be smart and guess what your textual data is about, often leading to undesired results.
Best to import a CSV via Power Query (Data ribbon, Get & Transform Data, From Text/CSV)
...... so that you have full control over the how the texts are transformed into numbers, dates or just stay plain texts. Alternatively, you can use the text-to-columns feature, also from the Data ribbon in the 'Data Tools' group, though it's not as sophisticated as Powe Query.
