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

This issue is still present in Mac Office 2011 and Office 2013, I cannot prevent it happening. It seems such a basic thing.

In my case I had values such as "1 - 2" & "7 - 12" within the CSV enclosed correctly within inverted commas, this automatically converts to a date within excel, if you try subsequently convert it to just plain text you would get a number representation of the date such as 43768. Additionally it reformats large numbers found in barcodes and EAN numbers to 123E+ numbers again which cannot be converted back.

I have found that Google Drive's Google Sheets doesnt convert the numbers to dates. The barcodes do have commas in them every 3 characters but these are easily removed. It handles CSVs really well especially when dealing with MAC / Windows CSVs.

Might save someone sometime.