NUMBER IN STRING CELL CONVERTS TO SCIENTIFIC NOTATION WHILE EXPORTING CSV

[Shell]

I haven't found any solution for this strange behavior and it's hard to believe it is not doable. 

I am loading an excel spreadsheet, and matching it with a SQL table on a COMMON NUMBER-LOOKING STRING COLUMN to find delta.

I don't seem to have any issue with the processing of workflow itself, however when I export the result into a CSV file, the very same column changes to 1E+12 format. 

As it can be seen in highlighted, the equipment column looks OK up to the last "input connector" of the output tool. however, the below snippet shows the same column turned into scientific notation. 

I have tried to add an apostrophe before the string to force it to perceive it as string but that added an extra character at the beginning of the number-looking-string. Excel perhaps would understand that but CSV is not that smart. Regardless, I can't add any leading space to it because there is another procedure takes this file and loads into a live table. I also tried adding following formula but that didn't help either.

ToString([EQUIPMENT],0)

What I want is for this string column to be exported as it is in CSV.

Any idea where I am dropping the ball?

Thanks in advance.

[DavidP]

I think your data is actually correctly written to the CSV file - try opening the file in a text editor like notepad.

It's most likely Excel that is not displaying it correctly when you open the csv file in EXcel

[AmandaH]

Have you tried placing quotes around the data? Doing the below in a formula tool should tell Excel when you open the file that this field is a string value.

'"' + ToString([EQUIPMENT],0) + '"'

[Shell]

David, you're right. 

Opening in Excel does it. 

[Shell]

Amanda, 

I did try adding leading apostrophe but didn't see the expected result - it simply added an extra character. When you mentioned wrapping, sounded like a good idea to tell excel. but unfortunately it made the matter worse.