Prevent Alteryx from changing data when loading excel sheet

[Uchiha_Itachi]

I am trying to input this excel sheet attached below into Alteryx. Some values in the column "Last Week / Weeks on List" are getting converted into a date format when loaded in Alteryx. Please see attachments below. I need it to remain in the same format so I can split per delimiter before analysis. Thanks

[Qiu]

@Uchiha_Itachi 
Can you force column "C" to be Text type data in Excel?

[apathetichell]

This is weird. Can you click on the cell which says 1/8 in Excel? Is the underlying data in excel a formatted date? 

[Uchiha_Itachi]

It didn't work. I had resave the whole excel sheet as a csv and then uploaded the sheet into Alteryx as a csv file instead of an excel file. For it to work. There must be simpler process. But that is too long a process. Thank you by the way. I tinkered with it for a while. 

[Uchiha_Itachi]

Very weird. Yes the "1/8" format in excel is under custom as "m/d" which I'm guessing is month/day. When I try to change it, it auto populates as a whole weird number ("43108"). Saving the whole sheet as a csv solves this problem but having to save an excel as a csv before inputing into Alteryx is an annoying process. Let me see if I can upload the excel sheet as a csv directly into Alteryx 

[apathetichell]

I understand your frustation - but Alteryx is correctly reading date values from excel and translating those to dates .You have 1/8 set up as a date in excel. you have an underlying number of 43108 set up there. That is days in 12-30-1899 (really 12-31-1899 including the day) - which when calculated becomes... 2018-01-08. Your issue is in the field types of your excel data - not in how Alteryx is reading it. I have no idea why your excel data is so weird.

[jdminton]

I agree with @apathetichell . You can use =IF(ISNUMBER(A2),TEXT(A2,"m/d"),A2) in another column to convert the formatting to text for all records or find a way to import the data as text to begin with.

[Uchiha_Itachi]

I absolutely understand you. Thank you for the feedback. The problem with preprocessing data /ETL is the fact that we most of the time cannot or do not control how the data is collected.

I would have preferred to able to fix this issue in Alteryx without going back to excel. Regardless of the field type in excel the data still remains 1/8 in the cell.  But In Alteryx the data type isn't coerced to datetime but rather a V_String so it shouldn't convert to 2018-01-03 if the point is how Alteryx read in the data.

I was primarily interested in determining whether Alteryx offered a solution to this seemingly uncommon issue.

[Uchiha_Itachi]

This worked thanks. Its another option to have without having to resave the whole excel document as a csv, which was the option that worked for me initially.

[jdminton]

I'm just curious, but is the data coming to you as an Excel workbook? Since Excel is the program formatting the field as a date, I'm wondering if someone is opening the file first. I've had issues with files once they're opened in Excel where there isn't an issue if I open them in Alteryx first.