is not a big hindrance when viewing the CSV in Notepad (etc),.
the zero-width space (ZWSP, Unicode U+200B) (If this is however a problem, look at other characters e.g.
Normally does not bother Mail Merge results (depending on the template layout - but normally it just adds a wide space at the end of a line).
#Excel text import wizard numbers as values code#
Available from keyboard or with an easy-to-remember ASCII code (9),.
The easiest however is to append (add after) the simple tab character (\t, ASCII 9). But there are various other printing and non-printing space characters that will work well. However, the plain old space character (\s, ASCII 32) doesn't work for this as it gets chopped off by Excel and then the value still gets converted. A non-printing character would be good as it will not alter the displayed value. If one pre/appends a non-numeric and/or non-date character in the value, the value will be recognized as text and not converted.
where human-readability might be important.
where the file might be imported into a program other than MS Excel (MS Word's Mail Merge function comes to mind),.
Two cases that I can think of that the "prepending =" solution, as mentioned previously, might not be ideal is Or the value contains characters that can be confused with mathematical operators (as in dates: /, -). Which sometimes can start with one or more zeroes (0), which get thrown away when converted to numeric. A couple of examples where this is problematic: The problem is not only with dates in text fields, but anything numeric also gets converted from text to numbers. CSV files are easy to generate from most programming languages, rather small, human-readable in a crunch with a plain text editor, and ubiquitous. I know this is an old question, but the problem is not going away soon.