As far as I know, there isn't a "real" solution to this problem. Both Excel, Works & OpenOffice treat anything that can be converted to a number as a number, whether it is wrapped in double quotes or not.

The closest I've come to a solution is to:

  • Wrap the number in double quotes
  • Also include a single quote before the leading zero

I haven't tested this in Excel, but in OpenOffice it appears to force the number into a text format. The single quote also does not appear in the print preview.

This seems to be a shortcoming of the csv format. It is supposed to be a very simple format, but it seems to fall short with this very common issue.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *