Phone numbers in exported files are missing leading zeros when opened in Excel

Owned by Clea Boyd-Eedle (Unlicensed)
Feb 16, 2018
1 min read

The leading zeros are in the CSV file, but this is due to the way some versions of Excel open a CSV file. It *thinks* the phone numbers are 'numbers' so it removes the leading zero.

There is a workaround. Don't open the CSV directly from Excel, instead:

  • Open a blank Excel file
  • Click File > Import Data
  • Select the CSV
  • You'll be walked through a wizard, make sure you select 'delimited data
  • There's a step where you can select the columns to be imported, and most important their data type - for the mobile column select 'Text' from the available options, the default will be 'General'
  • This forces Excel to treat those columns as Text and not automatically interpret them as numbers.