We have some tools that require files formatted in the CSV (comma-separated value) format. I use Excel to edit this file and save it as CSV. However, Excel has the nasty habit of lopping off decimal places in numbers if it thinks they are not needed.
For instance, I have a column for Release numbers. "17.0" is a valid release number but "17" is not. However, regardless of how many different ways I format the column as General, Text or Number with 1 decimal place, when I reload the CSV file it still has 17. This is because format information is not preserved in CSV...
A relate Microsoft acknowledgement of this problem is at:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q216023
But their solution does not work.
I wonder if I have to save it as a Excel workbook (xls) and then convert it to CSV when we need it...
Stupid! Excel SHOULD just provide an option to load in the values as they see them when loading a CSV and NOT interpret the values as numbers, text, dates, etc...
Suggestion?
Regards,
Jeff
Found this while searching for answers on Excel's terrible handling of "text that could be but is NOT a date" for saving a workbook sheet as a .csv file. The reverse of opening .csv in excel, but still...
Thought I would post that OpenOffice's spreadsheet app, which is free, will open .xls file just fine, and when saving to .csv format, has a checkbox for "save values as they appear". Handy. Beats this problem flat.