Open a CSV in LibreOffice Calc without converting values to scientific notation

csvlibreofficelibreoffice-calc

If I have a CSV file like this:

Id,Name,Reference
1,Alice,123EFG
2,Bob,456E89
3,Charles,7E9K2M
4,Donald,12345678E28496023749

and I open it in LibreOffice, some of the values are converted to scientific notation, like this:

screenshot from LibreOffice

Note that this is not just how the value is formatted for display. You can see from the formula box that actual value has been changed to scientific notation, so there is no way within LibreOffice at this point to recover the data that has been lost in this conversion.

How can I open the file in LibreOffice without these values being converted to scientific notation?

Best Answer

Try these options in the Text Import dialog:

  1. Deselect the 'Detect Special Numbers' checkbox
  2. In the preview area, click the column header where it is labeled 'Standard' and change it to 'Text'. According to the documentation:
    • Standard: LibreOffice determines the type.
    • Text: Imported data are treated as text.

enter image description here

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