Maybe we should have an official "Excel Help" thread Anyway, I'm having some trouble getting a column formatted correctly. Basically, I need the numbers to look like this... 09 01 09 09 09 09 01 01 NOT like this... 9 1 9 9 9 9 1 1 To achieve this, I went to "Custom" under cell formatting and selected the "0" option, then edited it to be "00". This works. The problem is in the next step, when I save as .CSV. I get the warning that some features may be lost when going to .CSV and that particular formatting is apparently one of them. I know that this can be done, because I did a similar import last week! I can't figure out what I did differently this time. And yes, I have to save to .CSV for the program I'm importing to.
i always put an apostrophe ' before my entry if I don't want excel correcting it for me. Dunno why it works, it just works. Edit: The apostrophe stores the number as text, but still treats it as a number. It won't show the apostrophe.
You'll have to use another colmun to format them. If you need leading zeroes, just paste the following formula in (Assuming the original data was in Column A) =RIGHT("000000", A1, 2). You can change that number if you need them to be more than 2 characters long. Paste it down, and you'll have your data formatted. Just range value it to where you need it.
Dang. It seemed to work, but when I saved the .CSV and re-opened it, the changes were gone. Thanks though.
Sure I could do that (I did something similar) but it doesn't help me at all when I go to save it as a .CSV file.
The text file does show the correct format, but I did a test import with this .CSV file last night and it came up incorrect.
Did you try kicking the crap out of your computer? It never really works for me, but damn it feels good sometimes!
Try renaming your CSV file to a TXT file. If you File->Open that through Excel, you can specify that it's comma delimited. If you specify that column to be text, it bring in the leading zeroes. I just tested that, and it worked.
After you prepend the 0 by formatting the cells (which you've done),you can copy the column into notepad, and then paste it from notepad back into the column and use "text to column". Set the particular column to text. Now when you export to CSV, it will have the 0s.
just as a tip for excel here is a free add-in that helps with a lot of formatting with excel www.asap-utilities.com
How'd you get the data? You're importing the data into Excel or trying to save it as a CSV to import it into another application like Access or something? Try dropping an X underneath the column header. Then when you save it as a .CSV file itll save the column as a Text column.
Thanks for the help everybody. Turns out I basically had it right to begin with, but when I opened it in Excel it was omitting the 0's. When I opened it in Notepad they were there. I just couldn't test the import until everyone was gone for the day.
