Guides

Preserve identifiers and leading zeros

Postal codes, invoice codes and membership numbers often look numeric but are identifiers. A value such as 00127 should not become 127. CSV has no way to mark a column as text for every spreadsheet application.

Ragve handles CSV values as text. Its XLSX writer creates string cells, preserving leading zeros in the source CSV. Convert a table with Code,Name and 00127,Ada to XLSX and check the code cell after opening the workbook.

Opening a CSV directly in Excel may trigger automatic type detection even when the exported text still contains zeros. Import the CSV through your spreadsheet data-import tool and choose Text for identifier columns, or download XLSX from Ragve.

If Excel already removed zeros in the source workbook, conversion cannot reconstruct the missing information. Inspect the original displayed values and use a trusted reference before making corrections.