can I make Excel always open a delimited text file with "text" translation?

Posted by khedron on Super User See other posts from Super User or by khedron
Published on 2010-03-23T03:34:05Z Indexed on 2010/03/23 3:41 UTC
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excel

Hi there,

Opening a tab-delimited data file in Excel to view & manipulate the data is a very common operation around here. However, by default Excel (2003/4 or 2007/8) will read the columns in a "General" format, which occasionally does terrible things like turning "1/2" into "2-Jan".

Is there a way to tell Excel never to do this, but always process the values as Text, without going through the format wizard, selecting all of the columns, and doing it manually?

Extra points if this works in both Mac and Windows versions of Excel.

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