Saving as a CSV and losing leading Zeros

[bluearmy35]

I wonder if anyone can help me with this problem, i have an excel spreadsheet that has a column with a series of numbers that have 6 numbers in each cell, now when i save this excel spreadsheet as a CSV it removes all the leading zero's therefore if something was in Excel as 000001 it comes over as 1. Is there anyway to get it into a CSV as what it was originally. Any help would be much appreciated

 

[collierd]

You could try preceedind each value with a single quote
Excel should then see it as text

Damian.

 

[MSIsam]

If you just want to recover your original format, you can open the csv file with notepad. To bring it into an xls format, you could then
1. Open a blank xls sheet and format all cells to Text (Format-Cells-Number Tab-Category=Text.
2. replace the commas with tabs in notepad (Since you can't type a tab in the Find and Replace window, you can press tab in the worksheet and cut it out (ctrl-X), and Paste that into the replace box)
3. paste into Excel.
I'm sure that there are more elegant ways to do this but it's a start.