Left zero fill zip codes/phone numbers on export

[Dennis Gray]

CiviCRM 4.1.5

This is an age-old problem but I'm hoping someone has a suggestion for a solution.

We have about 300 "admins" who need to export data for phonebanking.  One of the problems is that if a zip code is in a state like Vermont, it will start with a 0 but when the data is viewed in Excel, the leading zerp is dropped. It is not difficult to fix that with a mask but our people are not that computer literate so we are looking for a way to export the data in such a way that the leading zero is not dropped.

[petednz]

hi dennis

may seem an unnecessary workaround - but have you tried doing these as a Views export - wondering if the leading zero might be retained via that route

[Dennis Gray]

Thanks, Peter. I did a little more investigation. All the columns are quoted in the csv file and they do have the leading zero. The default in LibreOffice and probably Excel too is to strip them when the file is opened. In LO, there is an option to turn quoted numbers as text, so that works fine.