In the preview dialog box, you have several options: In the Import Data dialog box, locate and double-click the text file that you want to import, and click Import. On the Data tab, in the Get & Transform Data group, click From Text/CSV. You can import data from a text file into an existing worksheet. Once the data is open, I can always select a column and use the Format menu, Cells to adjust the Category if needed, but as long as it's set to Text Excel will leave the data alone.Import a text file by connecting to it (Power Query) In Excel, what Text essentially means is "Don't change anything." While I could go through the individual columns during Import and set the proper date, etc., the all Text approach is faster. On Step 3 of 3 select all columns (click on first, Shift+click on last).On Step 2 of 3 change the Delimiter to Comma.Now the wizard, which is identical for both importing and opening an unrecognized file:
You can get to this dialog by importing, or by opening a file with an extension Excel doesn't recognize (.txt will sometimes work). When you do need to be careful of the formats, you want to go through Excel's import dialog. If you don't have those in your data file, you'll generally be OK with a double-click to open.
If at this point you close the file without saving, it will still be OK, but the minute you save, the values will be permanently changed.ĭates in formats other than M/D/Y and pure number IDs such as Zips and some customer or employee IDs are the most vulnerable. On John's record the July 19 date is being treated like text (note the left alignment) because Excel doesn't recognize months greater than 12. On that same row Jane's Zip code has lost the leading zero, which you can see in the formula bar as completely gone, not simply hidden from view. While it may look like the date is still salvageable as the EU format, Excel codes dates with an underlying 5 digit value and this cell is now the Januvalue. The names are fine, but the May 1st date has been changed to January 5th. What Excel has done is classify all the columns as "General" format. If you double-click on this file, Excel opens it as:
0 kommentar(er)
