Stop Excel from automatically converting certain text values to dates

Question

Does anyone happen to know if there is a token I can add to my csv for a certain field so Excel doesn\'t try to convert it to a date?

I\'m trying to write a .csv fil

Answer 1

What I have done for this same problem was to add the following before each csv value: "=""" and one double quote after each CSV value, before opening the file in Excel. Take the following values for example:

012345,00198475

These should be altered before opening in Excel to:

"="""012345","="""00198475"

After you do this, every cell value appears as a formula in Excel and so won't be formatted as a number, date, etc. For example, a value of 012345 appears as:

="012345"