Force Excel to open .csv without formatting

Question

Is there a way to force Excel to open a .csv without formatting? I don't want it to remove the commas and create several columns. I understand I could just open it in notepad but I'd prefer to use excel.

Open it with Data, Get External Data, From Text and turn off all delimiting factors in the Import Wizard. — , May 17 '17 at 16:09
Im sorry but I do not follow. From My Documents how should I open it? — Jeremy Thomas, May 17 '17 at 16:11
ahhh from in Excel, nice! You should make it an answer and I'll accept — Jeremy Thomas, May 17 '17 at 16:12
You should not open it from My Documents; you open Excel, possibly to a blank worksheet then use Data, Get External Data, From Text. — , May 17 '17 at 16:12
I've posted an answer on same problem [here](https://stackoverflow.com/a/51806894/134824). — evilReiko, Aug 12 '18 at 08:02

score 15 · Accepted Answer · answered May 17 '17 at 16:18

15

You should not open it from My Documents; you open Excel, possibly to a blank worksheet then use Data, Get External Data, From Text.

Turn off all delimiting factors in the Import Wizard and it should come into the worksheet without separating the delimited values outside of a single cell per row.

answered May 17 '17 at 16:18

how one would make changes and save it in csv? – Sadiq Khoja Jan 11 '19 at 10:31
2

Outdated. Excel no longer has commands/menus with these exact names, nor does it have the same options. It keeps trying to use "Queries & Connections". Why can't Excel just load a file as plain text? – posfan12 Dec 16 '19 at 18:38

score -3 · Answer 2 · edited Aug 18 '18 at 01:23

excel option

open the excel option you can find on the start menu of excel.

excel option -> advanced -> Use system separator (disable this then excel will not convert anything from text).

IMO, such misleading option though, eg if I have "5.123.444,24" and we want get number format from it, by enabling "use system separator" with the option to convert "." as thousand separator and "," as decimal separator, seems that we are doing right.In fact, if it is enabled, we'll have 5.123.444,24 and with the option disabled , we'll have 512344,24 which means the text "5.123.444,24" has been converted to number.

Force Excel to open .csv without formatting

2 Answers2

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