Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by baobabKoodaa on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @08:58AM (#24697194)

No, that's not correct. The parent poster specifically made this false claim: "that's Excel's default behavior and you CANNOT TURN IT OFF!" The false claim is the part that the poster wrote in all caps. He said that this behavior can not be turned off, when in fact it can be turned off.

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Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by zentiggr on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @10:37AM (#24698081)

It can't be turned off, if you're opening a CSV in Excel.

It can be avoided, if you go through the Data | Import tools. The complaint is that few Excel users know that the import engine is available, or use it, instead of just opening the file and getting all the default interpolations. Which can't be avoided in the usual Open code path.

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Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by jugg1es on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @10:16AM (#24697841)

How? Where is the setting to turn it off when initially loading a file?

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Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by jasode on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @10:35AM (#24698071)

>How? Where is the setting to turn it off when initially loading a file?

Confusion is happening because 2 different ideas of Excel using csv files:

- you saying "can't turn this off" : File Explorer double-clicking a "csv" or MS Excel "File->Open" csv.

- others saying "you can preserve leading zeros" : click on Excel 2019 Data tab and import via "From Text/CSV" button on the ribbon menu and a dialog pops up that provides option "Do not detect data types" (Earlier version of Excel has different verbiage to interpret numbers as text)

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