Fuck you Excel, that’s a date, not $946,684,800
Honestly, the automatic datetime conversion is the worst part if you’re just trying to keep it text. It’s idiotic there isn’t a simple way to turn off that off. That’s not formatting, that’s actually changing the data in those cells which may not be what you want.
In case you’re not aware, the latest version of Excel absolutely DOES have that setting (mentioned elsewhere here in the comments). While it’s wild that it took so long, it’s now a solvable problem and everyone should know about it (and upgrade)!
Also means one has to give up the license they bought years ago for Office 2019 and actually pay monthly now.
I’m not sure what version got this, but there’s a setting now where you can disable auto-conversion and it’s amazing.
https://mashable.com/article/microsoft-excel-disable-setting-auto-conversion-data-into-dates
Holy crap, that’s amazing - I can’t believe it would take this long! I presume straight up numbers are no longer affected, too, but I’m almost willing to trust it and try it out…
Yeah it stops converting numbers too. At my job we have a lot of ids that start with 0, and it was super annoying to have ‘000123’ turn into ‘123’, now it keeps it as text.
libreoffice reigns supreme
CSV files having their leading zeros cut off fuck my entire world up.
Instead of just opening them with Excel, make a blank workbook or sheet, go to the data tab, import from text/csv. It’ll give you a bunch of menus and such where you can adnust how it reads the file and how it will format columns. Any column with leading zeros you want as text. It doesn’t fuck with “as text” columns.
The only caveat is that once you’ve imported the CSV that way, you’ll want to open the data sources tab and delete the connection to the csv file, otherwise changes in the original csv file will change shit in your spreadsheet, but only if excel feels like syncing it. Better to shut that off and do it yourself as needed.
can you imagine a world without excel?
