I have a huge CSV file.
It contains elements, delimited by commas, that are hyphenated.
Excel wants to interpret these as dates when I import.
The problem is that it doesn’t just format the cells as dates, but it actually changes the underlying data.
For example, if I have 4-30 in my CSV file, Excel imports this as 40663 (the date code for 4/30/11) and actually changes my data!!! But, if I have 0-21 in my data, it imports this as General and doesn’t change the underlying data.
I am aware of the possibility of doing a search and replace in my CSV to insert a single quote prior to each problem value. I am hoping someone has a better suggestion: if I do this I end up with some values in a column with Custom format and some with General.
I am willing to entertain fixes that allow Excel to import the 4-30 as 40663, and then fix the 40663 by converting it to a General as 4-30.
P.S. I cannot set the hyphen as a delimiting character because there are different numbers of elements in each row that suffer from this problem; it works to separate them, but creates a bigger editing problem.
