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.