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I had a followup question to this related post -

Formatting a CSV to force Excel to interpret value as a string (not date or number)

I was wondering how does one escape text starting with " using "=""Data Here""" in a TAB delimited file..

Example: 

 column1        column2        column3
 1              "SampleText    123465

I tried 

"=""""SampleText"""

and 

"="""SampleText"""

but neither worked!

Community
  • 1
aix
  • 171

1 Answers1

3

It's ugly, but here's what we did. For other reasons, we basically export an text file containing a html table, and give it a .xls filename. We have data that needs to show (and export) as a fraction. To keep Excel from re-interpreting it as a decimal - or even worse, a date - we follow each fraction with a space and an html non-breaking space.

<td>7/12 &nbsp;</td>

This gets brought into Excel as a text string and shown as "7/12" as our customer wants.

I don't know if you could do something similar with a tab-delimited file, but I hope it's worth something to you.

StevenV
  • 706