Excel – How to put all lines starting with a specific character combination on the previous line in Excel or Notepad++

One suggestion is to put an apostrophe in front of the number when you export the data to CSV format. So instead of 12345678901234567890 export '12345678901234567890.

This works:

Sub OpenCsvAsText(ByVal strFilepath As String)

    Dim intFileNo As Integer
    Dim iCol As Long
    Dim nCol As Long
    Dim strLine As String
    Dim varColumnFormat As Variant
    Dim varTemp As Variant

    '// Read first line of file to figure out how many columns there are
    intFileNo = FreeFile()
    Open strFilepath For Input As #intFileNo
    Line Input #intFileNo, strLine
    Close #intFileNo
    varTemp = Split(strLine, ",")
    nCol = UBound(varTemp) + 1

    '// Prepare description of column format
    ReDim varColumnFormat(0 To nCol - 1)
    For iCol = 1 To nCol
        varColumnFormat(iCol - 1) = Array(iCol, xlTextFormat)
        ' What's this? See VBA help for OpenText method (FieldInfo argument).
    Next iCol

    '// Open the file using the specified column formats
    Workbooks.OpenText _
            Filename:=strFilepath, _
            DataType:=xlDelimited, _
            ConsecutiveDelimiter:=False, Comma:=True, _
            FieldInfo:=varColumnFormat

End Sub

Usage:

OpenCsvAsText "C:\MyDir\MyFile.txt"

Comma-separated file is now open as Excel sheet with all columns formatted as text.

Note that @Wetmelon's wizard solution works just fine, but if you're opening many files then you may, like me, grow weary of, each time, scrolling to column 60 in order to Shift-Click it.

EDIT @GSerg states in the comment below that this "doesn't work" and "eats spaces and leading zeroes". I'll just quote the comment to the question, which is more descriptive:

For reasons unknown, even if you explicitly provide formats for all columns in VBA, Excel will ignore it if the file extension is CSV. As soon as you change the extension, that same code will yield the correct results.

So the code above "works", but gets killed by this ridiculous Excel behaviour. Whichever way you cut it, you're stuck having to change the extension to something other than ".csv", sorry! After that, you're home free.