Month abbreviation Interpretation

[Greg Pica]

I have a tab delimited text file that has a field of ID values. some of
those values have 3 letter prefixes that happen to match the 3 letter
abbreviation for the months of the year (Jan, Mar, Oct etc). When I open
the text file with Excel, excel interprets the 3 letter ID prefix as a month
and converts the field value to a date-like form. For example, MAR2104 is
converted to 3-1-2104. When I set the field format to TEXT, the
interpretation problem goes away, but the damage is done in that the
original field value has already been changed. Does anyone know of a
workaround or a solution to this situation?
thanks in advance, greg

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

I have a tab delimited text file that has a field of ID values. some of those
values have 3 letter prefixes that happen to match the 3 letter abbreviation
for the months of the year (Jan, Mar, Oct etc). When I open the text file
with Excel, excel interprets the 3 letter ID prefix as a month and converts
the field value to a date-like form. For example, MAR2104 is converted to
3-1-2104. When I set the field format to TEXT, the interpretation problem
goes away, but the damage is done in that the original field value has already
been changed. Does anyone know of a workaround or a solution to this
situation?
thanks in advance, greg

When you open the file with the text wizard, before you click finish, you
should come to a step that will allow you to set the format for that field.

 

[TH]

Don¹t you get the option when defining the format of your file to also
format the columns before importing? Normally you do, just keep on clicking
next and see if you can¹t format that first column to text before clicking
Finish.

TH