I'm working on an OCR correction list that involves all the mistakes an OCR app would make on a date: mm/dd/yy. That is, say, 01/01/06; O1/01/06, Q1/01/06, etc. The list has to be in a csv format. Word processing programs don't have ability to show so many columns. Excel can, and I've done the find and replace within groups to deal with the permutations, then exported to csv.
However, when I need to add to it, Excel of course wants to see the dates as dates and numbers as numbers -- that is, 01/01/06 is changed to 1/01/06, and 02101106 (where the OCR reads the / as 1) drops the leading zero. I can work around this by importing the csv file and selecting "TEXT" as the column format. However, the import function is limited to about 64 columns. Beyond that, I can't specify import as text, and it winds up importing columns 64-200 as general format (dropping the leading zero) and messing with dates. How can I get Excel to import AS IS?
However, when I need to add to it, Excel of course wants to see the dates as dates and numbers as numbers -- that is, 01/01/06 is changed to 1/01/06, and 02101106 (where the OCR reads the / as 1) drops the leading zero. I can work around this by importing the csv file and selecting "TEXT" as the column format. However, the import function is limited to about 64 columns. Beyond that, I can't specify import as text, and it winds up importing columns 64-200 as general format (dropping the leading zero) and messing with dates. How can I get Excel to import AS IS?
