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I have a question regarding Excel. We generate automatically a CSV file everyday, containing stuff looking like :

column1;column2;...;columnx
text;date;text;249316479917397279

The issue is that the number 249316479917397279 is too long now to be displayed by Excel entirely. Excels shows "2,49316E+17" and even when I go edit the cell I see 249316479917397000.

The number is rounded by Excel and I lose the three last numbers, which are important for me since these numbers are IDs. I would Excel to display it as a text, without no rounding. I tried to generate my csv with quotes "249316479917397279" but dosn't change anything.

Is it possible?

Timothee
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2 Answers2

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When you open a .csv Excel skips the "text import wizard" if you change the file to be .txt then open it the dialogue will come up and you can specify that the affected columns are treated as text.

Note if you treat columns as 'Text' not 'General' in some (all?) versions of Excel the data contained is truncated to 256 characters.

Nate
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I would avoid to open the file in a text editor and paste it in excel with a good formated column everytime.

Something working is to add ' before my number when I generate the CSV. I see the ' in excel but well, better than nothing.

Timothee
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