How to stop Excel from Auto-formatting and making it work like a number crunching program

You need to specify in the csv file that it is text. You do this by putting your number in quotes and preceeding with and equal sign, eg:

="001145",="55666",="02133"

The easiest way to do this would be to do a find-replace on , with ",=", replacing end of lines (you might need to use an advanced editor like Notepad++ for this) with "\r\n=" and doing the start and end of the file manually.

1. Change the file extension from ".csv" to ".txt" on the file you are having problems with.
2. Open excel by itself. Don't click on the file to open it.
3. Click "Open", change the file types to look for from "All Excel Files" to "All Files"
4. Find your file and click open. Since Excel doesn't auto format txt, it will then take you thru the wizard.
5. Makes sure the "Delimited" radio button is selected. Click the "next" button.
6. Check the "comma" delimiter box and keep hitting the "next" button until you SEE (but don't click on it) the finish button.
7. scroll thru each column in the spreadsheet, highlight each column(s) you want to manually format and change the format to "text".
8. Click the finish button.

Install OpenOffice from Oracle and do the same with OpenOffice's CSV format and it works.

I've had this problem in Windows 7 Pro with Excel 2010. I used to be able to copy Outlook contacts to Excel, save as CSV and import to Gmail and Android (the mobile numbers with leading zeros and + signs).