How to prevent google spreadsheed's IMPORTDATA() from interpreting text values as dates/numbers?

Question

Into a google spreadsheet i want to import a csv data (with IMPORTDATA() function) that contains some arbitrary (textual) codes. The function tries to (incorrectly) interpret some of those codes as numbers/dates and setting text as cell format for destination cells doesn't help.

So how to prevent IMPORTDATA() from automatic text to number/date conversion?

icaine · Accepted Answer · 2022-02-01 21:06:41Z

1

After some trial/error i have found that wrapping the function IMPORTDATA() with ARRAYFORMULA() seems to prevent this behaviour:

=ARRAYFORMULA(IMPORTDATA("..."))

answered Feb 1, 2022 at 21:06

icaine

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Tomás Cot Over a year ago

I tried this and it didn't work (still tried to parse cells), did you do something else?

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