Importing txt or csv file as text and only text

M

Mom

How come, after all these years and versions of Excel, an option has
not been added that will allow the user to "turn off" the default
conversion of certain text strings to numbers and dates when importing
text files?

All there seem to be are annoying work-arounds, the multi-step text-
import wizard, techniques to undo a conversion that wasn't requested
in the first place.
 
E

Earl Kiosterud

Mom,

Probably more confounding than Excel's automatically formatting stuff (often
inappropriately) is that often the user doesn't know it's done it. Words like
control-freak, anal, over-achiever come to mind. But we must make the best of it -- there
are no switches to turn it off.

Some ways of dealing with it are to record a macro while stepping through the text import
wizard, setting all the fields to text. Then just run the macro.

If you import the same stuff regularly, setting up a query is great. Data, Import External
Data - Import data. Point it to your text file, step through the text wizard, and it's
done. Now right click in your worksheet where it's imported the data, and you'll see you
can cause the import to happen again, same settings (Refresh Data). You can change the
import (Edit text import), or change the way it behaves when it does the import (Data Range
Properties). Pretty cool. Look Mom, no macro.
 
D

Dave Peterson

Did you use:
If you import the same stuff regularly, setting up a query is great.
Data, Import External Data - Import data.
Click to expand...

to import the data--or did you just use file|Open?
 
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