Stop Excel from trying to parse dates

**gbritton** · 02-09-2015, 04:32 PM

In my shop, I need to open CSV files in Excel. However, some of the fields in one of the CSV files look like dates, e.g. JAN22, MAR15, etc. In reality these are not dates. Excel though treats them like dates. The result is that the data from the CSV file is corrupted once loaded. I must go through a process of identifying fields that are dates and setting them back to text. (so I see 11-Sep and change it back to SEP11 as text).

How can I change my process or change Excel's options to prevent the auto-date parsing? I'm finding that my manual process to correct the data once loaded is not only tedious but error-prone.

Note (untested). I also suspect that if my CSV file contained data like 3.14159, Excel would think it is a number, instead of the text that it is.

**FDibbins** · 02-09-2015, 04:51 PM

Do you have a sample file we could play with?

**MrShorty** · 02-09-2015, 05:54 PM

When using the File - Open command or double clicking on a CSV file, Excel opens the file based on its default values. If you will change the file extension to .txt, so that Excel sees it as a "text" file rather than a CSV file (which are the same thing, all you are changing is how Excel works the open command), then Excel will prompt you with the Text Import Wizard, which will allow you to set options such as "treat this column as text and not number or date".