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

I know this is an old thread. For the ones like me, who still have this problem using office 2013 via powershell com object can use the opentext method. The problem is that this method has many arguments, that are sometimes mutual exclusive. To resolve this issue you can use the invoke-namedparameter method introduced in this post. An example would be

$ex = New-Object -com "Excel.Application"
$ex.visible = $true
$csv = "path\to\your\csv.csv"
Invoke-NamedParameter ($ex.workbooks) "opentext" @{"filename"=$csv; "Semicolon"= $true}

Unfortunately I just discovered that this method somehow breaks the csv parsing when cells contain linebreaks. This is supported by csv but microsofts implementation seems to be bugged. Also it did somehow not detect german specific chars. Giving it the correct culture did not change this behaveiour. All files (csv and script) are saved with utf8 encoding. First I wrote the following code to insert the csv cell by cell.

$ex = New-Object -com "Excel.Application"
$ex.visible = $true;
$csv = "path\to\your\csv.csv";
$ex.workbooks.add();
$ex.activeWorkbook.activeSheet.Cells.NumberFormat = "@";
$data = import-csv $csv -encoding utf8 -delimiter ";"; 
$row = 1; 
$data | %{ $obj = $_; $col = 1; $_.psobject.properties.Name |%{if($row -eq1){$ex.ActiveWorkbook.activeSheet.Cells.item($row,$col).Value2= $_ };$ex.ActiveWorkbook.activeSheet.Cells.item($row+1,$col).Value2 =$obj.$_; $col++ }; $row++;}

But this is extremly slow, which is why i looked for an alternative. Appearently Excel allows you to set the values of a range of cells with a matrix. So i used the algorithm in this blog to transform the csv in a multiarray.

function csvToExcel($csv,$delimiter){
     $a = New-Object -com "Excel.Application"
     $a.visible = $true

    $a.workbooks.add()
     $a.activeWorkbook.activeSheet.Cells.NumberFormat = "@"
     $data = import-csv -delimiter $delimiter $csv; 
     $array = ($data |ConvertTo-MultiArray).Value
     $starta = [int][char]'a' - 1
     if ($array.GetLength(1) -gt 26) {
         $col = [char]([int][math]::Floor($array.GetLength(1)/26) + $starta) + [char](($array.GetLength(1)%26) + $Starta)
     } else {
         $col = [char]($array.GetLength(1) + $starta)
     }
     $range = $a.activeWorkbook.activeSheet.Range("a1:"+$col+""+$array.GetLength(0))
     $range.value2 = $array;
     $range.Columns.AutoFit();
     $range.Rows.AutoFit();
     $range.Cells.HorizontalAlignment = -4131
     $range.Cells.VerticalAlignment = -4160
}

 function ConvertTo-MultiArray {
     param(
         [Parameter(Mandatory=$true, Position=1, ValueFromPipeline=$true)]
         [PSObject[]]$InputObject
     )
     BEGIN {
         $objects = @()
         [ref]$array = [ref]$null
     }
     Process {
         $objects += $InputObject
     }
     END {
         $properties = $objects[0].psobject.properties |%{$_.name}
         $array.Value = New-Object 'object[,]' ($objects.Count+1),$properties.count
         # i = row and j = column
         $j = 0
         $properties |%{
             $array.Value[0,$j] = $_.tostring()
             $j++
         }
         $i = 1
         $objects |% {
             $item = $_
             $j = 0
             $properties | % {
                 if ($item.($_) -eq $null) {
                     $array.value[$i,$j] = ""
                 }
                 else {
                     $array.value[$i,$j] = $item.($_).tostring()
                 }
                 $j++
             }
             $i++
         }
         $array
     } 
} 
csvToExcel "storage_stats.csv" ";"

You can use above code as is it should convert any csvs into excel. Just change the path to the csv and the delimiter character at the bottom.