Yes, even at Purple Frog Systems we use Excel!

Excel is great for that quick and dirty analysis, but there is nothing worse than opening a CSV file directly with Excel and finding out you’ve lost all of your leading zeros.

Take a look at my Sales.csv file

Viewed as a CSV in Notepad++ it looks as it should…

However viewed directly using Excel…

It now looks like I’ve got a sales quantity of 62 for product id 5!

To solve this :

  1. Open a new Excel Workbook
  2. Click “Data” Tab In Excel Ribbon
  3. Click “From Text/CSV”
  4. Select your required CSV file from your File Explorer & Click “Import”
  5. Click “Transform Data”
  6. Remove “Changed Type” in Applied Steps
  7. Click “Close and Load”

Problem solved!

I hope you find this blog useful…let me know in the comments if you’ve got any other quick Excel tips and tricks for data users!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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