Excel converts long numbers to scientific notation when opening CSV files

That setting doesn't work on my machine when opening a csv file.

Nope. When I save and reopen the scientific notation returns.

I've seen a few posts on here complaining about Excel converting long numbers to scientific notation when opening a CSV file.

A typical misunderstanding of newbies, when you deactivate the conversion you get a text instead of a number.

And if you try a calculation, the text is ignored by e.g. SUM, or the basic operators +-*/ convert the text into a number and large numbers are shown by a scientific notation by default. So if we want to get a number, your suggestion makes no sense at all.

Any number, also in scientific notation, can be shown as normal number if you simply change the number format of the cell.

Andreas.

Nope. When I save and reopen the scientific notation returns.

Not sure what you are saying "nope" to.

Yes, the problem of large numbers being formatted as Scientific occurs when Excel opens the file.

But that is not how the large numbers were saved to the CSV file, unless they appeared in Scientific format in Excel just before saving.

See my response to your separate new thread. Continue the discussion there.

However, during the SN conversion, numbers longer than 15 digits have the extra digits turned to zeroes. So, if you need to do math including those extra digits, you're out of luck. At least with the solution above, you can get the whole string of numbers, then convert the cells to numbers.

That's why we say do NOT open a CSV file, import it!

CSV means nothing, it's a text and you can have a lot of trouble if you open a CSV.

Power Query - How to import a CSV file that does not match your locale - Microsoft Community

Working with CSV files means usually you want to import a lot of data. And a lot of data is means usually you want to analyze the data.

If you save the CSV with always the same name in the same folder as your Excel file and use PQ to import, tomorrow if you get new data, all you have to is to click Data \ Refresh all and you're done.

If you open a CSV means you have to copy & paste the data into your analyze file, adjust the formulas to fit the number of rows... whatever you do, there is always a chance that you do something wrong and therefore the result is wrong.

From my point of view, open a CSV file is a bad habit, introduced many decades ago. It's like if you still want to start a car with a crank... as in 1920!?

Andreas.