Importing Excel spreadsheets

[George]

When importing an Excel spreadsheet, VW attempts to treat text fields such as "2-56" (a thread size) or "1/4" (a drill size) as numeric data. How can I have VW treat these fields - all fields, in fact - as plain text?

[Guest]

You have to put a character before or after the number.

2-56 would need to be .2-56 or some other character.

[George]

Thanks for the response Katie! Unfortunately, inserting a character in front of each such field seems unneccessarily tedious, and litters the worksheet with extraneouis characters. Given spreadsheets' flexibility and broad range of applications, this limitation in VW worksheeets seems very surprisng, and makes me wonder what sorts of applications the designers had in mind.

[P Retondo]

Is there a hidden character that will do the job? In Excel, its an " ' " (apostrophe). Put that before a number like 0005 to get the zeros to show up, but Excel does not display or print the '.

[Guest]

A single quote around the text or numbers will also work.