Excel keeps eating my zeros

At 11:07 a.m., I chased why 203 addresses failed my checksum, only to find Excel had ‘helpfully’ eaten the leading zero and turned 5-digit ZIPs into 4. I’m now forcing the column to text, padding left to length 5, and adding a pre-import variance check — any cleaner trick to stop spreadsheets from freelancing?

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I beat this by importing through Power Query (Data > Get Data > From Text/CSV), turning ‘Detect data types’ off and setting the ZIP column to Text before Load, so Excel never retypes it; tiny caveat: if someone changes the type later the zeros can vanish again — do you use PQ already?

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