Importing textfile with leading 0's to excel

Question

Have a number of text files which have numbers next to names, tab delimited:

000454          Name1
005005          Name2
000643          Name3
4043            Name4
33643           Name5

I frequently need to import it into excel to do things. But when I import it in excel it removes all those leading zeroes. I can't do a concatenate to add two zeroes to the beginning because some never have zeroes infront to begin with, and then becomes a painful manual process of rechecking and adding.

So my question is how can I import it into excel without this happening ?

Cheers

Answer 1

The Text Import wizard allows you to do this.

In MS Excel 2010 & 2007:

1. Click the "Data" Tab
2. Click "From Text"
3. Select Delimited,
4. Select Tab as the delimiter,
5. Select the column with your 'numbers' and set the Column Data Format as Text.