Some Guardian-exported horse form formatted as dates.

[weemac]

Both the output CSV and my own spreadsheet insist on formatting form figures such as "23-1" as a date, no matter how I format the appropriate column.

Has anyone else come across this, or perhaps have a suggested solution?

[MemphisFlash]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoJ_-qz6WiE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pgrg8yc-nA

[firlandsfarm]

Not a full answer as I haven't tried exporting form but when I copy form and paste it into a spreadsheet I firstly set the format for the cells where the form will go to "text" and then paste to "match destination format". Whether you can set cells in a spreadsheet to be formatted as text by default I don't know. Maybe try doing as I suggest but import the CSV into the spreadsheet rather than opening it.

[weemac]

I'll give that a bash, thanks. I've thought of a workaround using helper columns to insert a zero before each line of form, and that stops Excel seeing it as a date. Excel does tend to have lots of these irritating features!

[Atho55]

Pasting the data into Notepad first, then copy into Excel sometimes works