Importing CSV with Excel

If you have a CSV (Comma-Separated Values) export and you want to open it in Excel, this is the "safe" way to do it -- otherwise, Excel will happily erase the leading zeroes from our New England zip codes.

1. Make a new, empty spreadsheet.

2. File menu -> Import -> CSV -> pick the export file -> "Get Data"

3. Text Import Wizard 1 of 3 -- choose "delimited" and hit Next:

4. Text Import Wizard 2 of 3 -- choose "comma" and hit Next:

5. Text Import Wizard 3 of 3 -- click 1st column, scroll to right, hold shift and click last column (they may look like they're already highlighted, but make sure you shift-click the last column anyway), then select "text" and hit Finish:

The resulting document will NOT try to interpret zip codes as integers, but instead treat them as text, and leave them intact.