Though I try to avoid it, I occasionally have to open a CSV file in Excel. When I do, it formats columns containing numbers, which makes them useless for my purposes. As far as I can tell, the only way to prevent this from happening on import is to rename the file so the extension isn't .csv and use the import wizard to specify the format of each column individually. For files with 50-60 columns, this is impractical.
Since every answer for this oft-asked question on the internet suggests either some means of converting the formatted numbers back once the file is open (which won't work for me - I want to solve the general problem, not a few specific cases) or manually selecting the format type of each column (which I don't want to do), I'm looking for a way to set a global preference or style such that all columns of all CSV files opened are always formatted as text. I know about "armoring" the numbers with quotes, too, but the files I get don't come like that and I was hoping to avoid having to pre-process the files so Excel doesn't screw them up.
Is there a way to do specifically this: Always format all columns in opened CSV files as text, without manually selecting each column every time during import?
I'm using Excel 2003, but I'll take answers for 2007 if that's what you know.