Preventing Leading 0's From Being Dropped When Opening a CSV File in Excel 2013

Importing a Supplier’s Price List into Microsoft Excel

Or

Keeping The Leading 0's and Maintaining The Barcode Format

To prevent leading zeros from being dropped when opening a CSV file in Excel, as well as making sure that barcodes are imported correctly, you must follow this process:

1: Open up a blank Excel spreadsheet

2: Go to the menu option DATA, then click on From Text - Import External Data - Import Data

3: Browse to the data file you are trying to import. In my case, the file I want to import was saved to my desktop. Click on the file to select it, and then click the import button.

4: Then set to delimited, and select next.

5: In most cases you would set the delimiters to comma, and un-check any others. But in some cases I have seen suppliers use Semicolon delimiters. If you are unsure, look at the preview window and between each piece of information you should see a delimiter. If you are unsure, just check each delimiter check box one at a time until you see the data in the preview window move into columns like the example below. Once your data looks like this, select next.

6: Every column in the Data Preview Pane must be converted to Text fields. To do this, select the first column, then, using the scroll bar, move to the last column. Then hold down the shift key on your keyboard, and click on the last column. This should blacken out all the columns to show they have all been selected. Now click on the radial button next to Text. You should now see that all the headings in your Data Preview window have changed from General to Text. You can use the scroll bar to move back and forth to verify that all columns have been changed to Text.