How can I stop Microsoft Excel from auto formatting data when imported from a text file? Specifically, I want it to treat all of the values as text.
I am auditing insurance data in excel before it is uploaded to the new database. The files come to me as tab delimited text files. When loaded, Excel auto-formats the data causing leading 0's on Zip Codes, Routing Numbers and other codes, to be chopped off.
I don't have the patience to reformat all of the columns as text and guess how many zeros need to be replaced. Nor do I want to click through the import wizard an specify that each column is text.
Ideally I just want to turn off Excel's Auto-Formatting completely, and just edit every cell as it were plain text. I don't do any formula's or charts, just grid plain text editing.
Answer:
This should work for you: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/undo-or-turn-off-automatic-formatting-HA102491299.aspx#_Toc288715973
When Excel applies the automatic formatting, you can click the AutoCorrect Options button Button image that appears and choose to:
Undo the formatting (and you choose to redo it after you undo it) for this instance only
Change the specific AutoFormat options globally by clicking the stop option so that Excel stops making this change
Change the options for Excel by clicking Control AutoFormat Options.
No comments:
Post a Comment