How to Open a CSV Spreadsheet in Mac Excel Without Losing Leading Zeros

Excel loves to reformat your data when you open a file. Unfortunately, that means it might remove “leading” zeros when you open a spreadsheet.

For example, your employee numbers may start with a few zeros, “0001024”. Excel (trying to be helpful) removes those zeros and now you see “1024”. That’s a bummer if your extra zeros are important.

Fortunately there’s a way to open the spreadsheet without any automatic formatting. Check it out: