I have a .xls I need to convert to .csv
The file contains some date columns. The format on the date is "*14/03/2001" which, according to Excel means the date responds to regional date and time settings specified for the OS.
Opening in Excel you see:
20/01/2013
01/05/2013
Save as... CSV
Open in notepad:
01/20/2013
05/01/2013
I have temporarily fixed by setting date formats to "14/03/2001" (no *) but even some other custom formats with no *, like "d/mm/yyyy h:mm" get mangled when saved to CSV.
Although keeping this in mind http://xkcd.com/1179/
In the end I decided to use the format YYYYMMDD in all CSV files, which doesn't convert to date in Excel, but can be read by all our applications correctly.