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I am trying to OPEN .txt-file in Excel. The values should be numeric but instead are shown as dates! When manually converting "date columns" to "general" or "numeric", the number is not shown correctly. Eg. the value should be 1.71942 -- it is shown as date 1.7.1942 --- when manually changing the format --> 15523.

This is what I found: "If there is a recognizible date in the data, the cell will be formatted as a date in the worksheet even if the setting for the column is General. "

The question is: how to best avoid this problem and open the data in the right form? I really appreciate any advice!

smallacts
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  • IMPORT the file instead of OPENing it (Data Ribbon / Get External Data Tab / From Text. This will open the Text Import Wizard and allow you to specify that column as Text. – Ron Rosenfeld Sep 28 '14 at 19:26

1 Answers1

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According to Microsoft:

Unfortunately there is no way to turn this off. But there are ways to get around it.

If you can change the content of the text file before opening it into Excel, there are several ways. For example, you could insert an apostrophe ' before the number. See this other post on Stack Overflow too.

Community
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Benjamin BALET
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