How to make your CSV file not change your data when opening in Excel
This guide is for people that are having to open their CSV file to edit something and they are finding that Excel is changing their data. For e.g the leading zero's are disappearing on an invoice number - 001257 is displayed as 1257 or long numbers are being abbreviated - 8240053201820 is shown as: 8.24005E+12
Customise Excel to Leave Data Unchanged
1. The 1st step is to not open your CSV file when it downloads to your computer. Just leave it where it is for the moment.
2. Next you need to open a blank Excel file
3. Click on Data> select 'From Text' > find your CSV file on your computer & click Import> this will open a Text Import Wizard> from here select Delimited> click Next
4. Put a tick in the Comma box & remove other ticks> click Next
5. Next we need to highlight all the boxes at the bottom as we want to change them all to text.
To do this click on the 1st column and hold down the Shift key, scroll to the far right and click on the last column, then release the Shift key - this will turn all columns black. Then click on the word 'Text' above> then click Finish
6. A small Import Data box will pop-up in which you just click on OK
7. Your data file will then be imported into this new file & displayed correctly
8. You can now change what you need to and save it
To save it click on File> Save As>select where you want to save it> name the file and change the 'Save As Type' to be 'CSV (Comma delimited) (*.csv)'
You can now upload the CSV into your software
Remember, if you have opened a csv before this is set, it is more than likely that Excel will have changed the data in some way which will later affect the export.
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