Text Import Wizard For Mac
Yeah, like when a file with 10000 usernames has one such as 'april25', that gets converted to a date, and eventually gets processed as 'apr-25', resulting in a 'username not found' error, because you didn't expect Excel to be converting a single value to a date, 4000 records into the file, while leaving the rest text. What lame CSV reading code; really, isn't it supposed to guess the type based on the first X records and stick with it?
Microsoft quietly replaced the comfortable Text Import Wizard from Excel and replaced it with the “Get & Transform” tools. The “Get & Transform” tools offer a lot of options and are very powerful. Instead use Data > Import External Data > Import Data. This will invoke the Text Import Wizard, which lets you choose the delimiter. Or, if you're using the newer interface, go to the Data tab > From Text: This will pull up a File Open dialog, followed by the same Text Import dialog.
Or leave it all text. If I want it formatted as 'general', I can pick that later. By assuming 'general' right from the start, it risks text data corruption. – Apr 15 '11 at 17:50 •. All these solutions to use File -> Open -> Import work ok for us because we know what we're doing, but it is useless for the other 99.5% of the world who don't understand navigating the filesystem from /within/ an application.
Microsoft Excel Text Import Wizard
Word for mac show page breaks. They see a file, to use it they double-click on it. I've spent 25 years teaching people how to use office applications and writing code that generates data for said office applications, and using the /application/ to look for the file to use is completely beyond almost everybody. – Mar 31 '17 at 15:26.
I know this is an old question, but the problem is not going away soon. CSV files are easy to generate from most programming languages, rather small, human-readable in a crunch with a plain text editor, and ubiquitous. The problem is not only with dates in text fields, but anything numeric also gets converted from text to numbers. A couple of examples where this is problematic: • ZIP/postal codes • telephone numbers • government ID numbers which sometimes can start with one or more zeroes (0), which get thrown away when converted to numeric. App for mac picture to textnow.
Text Import Wizard Macro
Text Import Wizard
Or the value contains characters that can be confused with mathematical operators (as in dates: /, -). Two cases that I can think of that the 'prepending =' solution, as mentioned previously, might not be ideal is • where the file might be imported into a program other than MS Excel (MS Word's Mail Merge function comes to mind), • where human-readability might be important. My hack to work around this If one pre/appends a non-numeric and/or non-date character in the value, the value will be recognized as text and not converted. A non-printing character would be good as it will not alter the displayed value. However, the plain old space character ( s, ASCII 32) doesn't work for this as it gets chopped off by Excel and then the value still gets converted. But there are various other printing and non-printing space characters that will work well.
The easiest however is to append (add after) the simple tab character ( t, ASCII 9). Benefits of this approach: • Available from keyboard or with an easy-to-remember ASCII code (9), • It doesn't bother the importation, • Normally does not bother Mail Merge results (depending on the template layout - but normally it just adds a wide space at the end of a line). (If this is however a problem, look at other characters e.g. The zero-width space (ZWSP, Unicode U+200B) • is not a big hindrance when viewing the CSV in Notepad (etc), • and could be removed by find/replace in Excel (or Notepad etc). • You don't need to import the CSV, but can simply double-click to open the CSV in Excel.
