How to open a csv file in excel, without loosing the Zero.

Seems basic?  You’d be surprised just how many people get stuck on this.  The fundamental issue is that excel recognises the phone number as a “number” column.  Which it is.  But how many numbers do you know that start with ZERO?  That’s right…NONE!

So, how do you trick, Excel into letting you see the zero?  Read on;

Step 1 ) Right click on the file and rename the file extension from .csv to .txt.  (if you can’t see file extensions, go to: Control Panel – Folder Options – View – Un-tick the box “Hide extensions for known file types”)

Step 2 ) Open Excel, and make sure that it only takes up half of one screen.

Step 3) Drag the text file, with your left mouse button, into the Excel sheet and let go of the mouse button.

Step 4 ) Select column “A” in excel.  You should now see the entire column highlighted in blue.

Step 5 ) Go to the menu and click on “Data”, then “Text to Columns”. At this point, a new window will pop up.

Step 6 ) Ensure that the radio button is on “Delimited” and click “Next”.

Step 7 ) It’s a “Comma” separated file, so make sure “comma” is ticked.  Click “Next”

Step 8 ) Scroll across to the phone field and select the phone field(the phone field will now be highlighted in black), and ensure that it’s “Column Data Format” is “TEXT”.  Click “Finish”.

Step 9) Auto calibrate your column width by clicking here once, then double click in-between column A and B.

DONE!

Just a little “Gotcha” to be aware of…If you open a CSV file, and then save it (no matter what file type you save it as) you WILL LOOSE THE LEADING ZERO of ANY number!