How on earth is this the top rated comment? I would downvote it if I could. As other people have noted, you can import CSVs values as strings instead of numbers.
Furthermore, losing preceding zeroes in number-typed values is not unique to excel; it is a common feature in all typed programming languages.
> you can import CSVs values as strings instead of numbers
Of course, but the problem isn't that the person who posted the comment doesn't know this - it's that many users of their systems don't know it. Most people are just going to accept whatever defaults Excel suggests and not know any better, causing problems down the line.
No, that's not correct. The parent poster specifically made this false claim: "that's Excel's default behavior and you CANNOT TURN IT OFF!" The false claim is the part that the poster wrote in all caps. He said that this behavior can not be turned off, when in fact it can be turned off.
It can't be turned off, if you're opening a CSV in Excel.
It can be avoided, if you go through the Data | Import tools. The complaint is that few Excel users know that the import engine is available, or use it, instead of just opening the file and getting all the default interpolations. Which can't be avoided in the usual Open code path.
>How? Where is the setting to turn it off when initially loading a file?
Confusion is happening because 2 different ideas of Excel using csv files:
- you saying "can't turn this off" : File Explorer double-clicking a "csv" or MS Excel "File->Open" csv.
- others saying "you can preserve leading zeros" : click on Excel 2019 Data tab and import via "From Text/CSV" button on the ribbon menu and a dialog pops up that provides option "Do not detect data types" (Earlier version of Excel has different verbiage to interpret numbers as text)
Furthermore, losing preceding zeroes in number-typed values is not unique to excel; it is a common feature in all typed programming languages.