Working With CSV Imports

No Mater what requirements tool you work with at some point you are going to be using Comma Separated Values (CSV) to import objects into your tool.

Most often you will open them in MS Excel to work the data. What i find is that excel tries to help you and reformats certain types of data. Just last week i had a data file from excel and some data that was in the following format xx-xx-xx. The data was OK in the excel file as the column was formated correctly. But upon saving it as a CSV for importing some of the data fell into what excel thought was a date and changed those to a date “7 July 2010″. As i need the data to be true what i had to do to fix this was.
Work in the excel format as a .xls and then save it as CSV, and here is the trick. After you save it as a CSV Do Not Reopen it. If you do excel will convert the data. You could open it in some thing like Note Pad and it will be OK but stay away for excel after you save it.