Excel Autoformat completely messes up a file generated by a 3rd party program

[Origim]

Hello,

I have a serious issue with Excel 2000 (I know, but that's what our office uses). I would assume same issue would happen regardless of Excel version.


Problem:

I am using PDF2XL to convert PDF Data to excel Data. Now, one of the data fields is in the following format = "###E-#" such as "653E-4" which is a model number that would read six five three ee dash four. You can see where this is going.

When the file is converted and PDF2XL generates a brand new excel file, it automatically converts it to scientific notation. Now, the conversion goes on to an Access database and we need the data to be in STRING format.

Obviously, changing it to string causes the number to become 0.0653, which is the worst thing ever. And I can write VBA code and I can try bunch of other things, but because the file is NEW and has NO relation to anything saved already, I can't find a way to turn off autoformat before it completely changes the cell value.

Is there any way to make excel permenantly shut off auto formatting, for any and all new files?

Thanks.

 

[Derek Brown]

Hello and welcome to The Board.
Although I have tested this using Excel/Access 2010, I don't see any reason why it should not work with earlier versions because the formatting is being done in PDF2XL.
When selecting the data in the PDF file, you need to select that column and using the menu "Layout | Column Format" you need to select "Text".
Doing this resulted in the data being seen by Excel as text (653E-4) and when I imported the workbook to Access as a new table, the format remained as text (653E-4).