Re: AS400 to EXCEL

[Douglas Handy <dhandy1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike,

>As soon as you attempt to export a
>file with New Jersey zip codes in it, you will see that Excel will not keep
>the leading zeros of a CSV file, no matter what you do.  Believe me, I've
>tried.

Sure it will.  Going back to the days of Lotus 1-2-3, you can control the
formatting of a cell by a leading character.  Place a single apostrophe in front
of the text you enter into a cell and it becomes a left-aligned text entry even
if the entire data portion are digits. 

Try it when keying in Excel (or Lotus 1-2-3 <g>) and you'll see what I mean.
You should see the little green triangle in the upper left corner of the cell,
signifying it is a text formatted cell.  It also works on importing text from a
CSV, as best I can recall.

Lotus had other leading characters which were less commonly used, such as a
double quote for a right-aligned text entry, or a caret (^) for a center-aligned
text entry.  However, Excel won't honor these unless you go to menu Tools ->
Options, Transition tab, and check "Transition navigation keys".

It honors a leading single quote (') either way.  Sometimes you just have to
resurrect techniques from 20 years ago!  (Or be old enough to know about
them...)

Doug