Formatting a comma-delimited CSV to force Excel to interpret value as a string
Problem
I've been searching around for a while trying to figure out how to output a CSV file in such a way to force Excel to interpret the values as a string and not try to convert them to numbers or dates. e.g.: Excel tries to "intelligently" convert all these to its native date/number formats. Is there a way around that? EDIT: Clarified the intent of my question, sorry for confusion.
Error Output
"141", "10/11/2002", "350.00", "1311742251"
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1 Fix
Fix for: Formatting a comma-delimited CSV to force Excel to interpret value as a string
For those that have control over the source data, apparently Excel will auto-detect the format of a CSV field unless the CSV column is in this format: eg... It also works in Google Spreadsheet, but not sure if other spreadsheet apps support this notation. If you suspect any the data may contain quotes itself, you need to double-escape them, like this... (EDIT: Updated with corrections, thanks DMA57361!)
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