CSV for Excel, Including Both Leading Zeros and Commas

Question

I want to generate a CSV file for user to use Excel to open it.

If I want to escape the comma in values, I can write it as \"640,480\".

If I want to keep the

Answer 1

If you are using "Content-Disposition" and exporting from asp to excel using HTML tags,then you have to add "style='mso-number-format:\@;'" to that tag and making it to accept only Text values ,thereby leading zeroes omission will be avoided,If Forward slash"\" is accepted use double forward slash "\"

Answer 2

This is straightforward using Excel's Power Query functionality that allows you to perform step-by-step transformations.

Original File:

Add a Custom Column:

Answer 3

Looking more at the Excel spreadsheet it looks what you want can't be done using CSV.

This site http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HP052002731033.aspx says "If cells display formulas instead of formula values, the formulas are converted as text. All formatting, graphics, objects, and other worksheet contents are lost. The euro symbol will be converted to a question mark."

However, you can change how you load it to get the result you want. See this web page: Microsoft import a text file.

The key thing is to choose Import External Data-Import Data-Text Files, go Next, Next, and then tick "Text" under column data format. This will prevent it being interpreted as a number, and losing formatting.

Answer 4

Since no-one mentioned it already, figured it was worth mentioning it in this old post.

If you add a horizontal tab character \t before the number, then MS Excel will also show the leading zero's. And the tab character doesn't show in the excel sheet. Even if it's surrounded by double-quotes. (F.e. \"\t001,002\")

It also looks nicer in Notepad++, compared to putting a \0 aka NULL before such number.

Answer 5

Pretty old thread but why don't you just add whitespace after your value. It will be then treated as string and no leading zeros will be stripped.

"001,002"." "

Answer 6

Excel uses a default formatting for CSV columns depending on the content. So if you have 001 in a csv, excel will automatically turn it to 1.

The only way to keep the leading zeros in excel from a csv file is by changing the extension of the csv file to .txt, then just open excel, click on open, select the txt file, and you'll see the Text Import Wizard. Select your csv format (separated by commas), then just make sure you select "Text" as the format.

And that's it, now you can export that previous csv data to any other while keeping the leading zeros.