csv - Excel changes date formats

Question

I run a process to produce a rather large CSV file of data. Sometimes I find it helpful to open the CSV in excel, make changes manually, and then re-save. However, if there are dates in the CSV, excel automatically reformats them. Is there a way to prevent excel from doing this? It would be helpful if I could turn off all text formatting altogether.

Answer 1

If you prepend an apostrophe ' to the beginning of any date string during the export process, Excel will read the value literally (i.e. as plain text) rather than trying to convert it to a date.

This particular solution is handled during the export process. I'm not sure how you would change Excel to treat the file differently at runtime.