formatting - How can I set Excel to always import all columns of CSV files as Text?

Though I try to avoid it, I occasionally have to open a CSV file in Excel. When I do, it formats columns containing numbers, which makes them useless for my purposes. As far as I can tell, the only way to prevent this from happening on import is to rename the file so the extension isn't .csv and use the import wizard to specify the format of each column individually. For files with 50-60 columns, this is impractical.

Since every answer for this oft-asked question on the internet suggests either some means of converting the formatted numbers back once the file is open (which won't work for me - I want to solve the general problem, not a few specific cases) or manually selecting the format type of each column (which I don't want to do), I'm looking for a way to set a global preference or style such that all columns of all CSV files opened are always formatted as text. I know about "armoring" the numbers with quotes, too, but the files I get don't come like that and I was hoping to avoid having to pre-process the files so Excel doesn't screw them up.

Is there a way to do specifically this: Always format all columns in opened CSV files as text, without manually selecting each column every time during import?

I'm using Excel 2003, but I'll take answers for 2007 if that's what you know.

Answer

This works:

Sub OpenCsvAsText(ByVal strFilepath As String)
    Dim intFileNo As Integer
    Dim iCol As Long
    Dim nCol As Long
    Dim strLine As String
    Dim varColumnFormat As Variant
    Dim varTemp As Variant
    '// Read first line of file to figure out how many columns there are
    intFileNo = FreeFile()
    Open strFilepath For Input As #intFileNo
    Line Input #intFileNo, strLine
    Close #intFileNo
    varTemp = Split(strLine, ",")
    nCol = UBound(varTemp) + 1
    '// Prepare description of column format
    ReDim varColumnFormat(0 To nCol - 1)
    For iCol = 1 To nCol
        varColumnFormat(iCol - 1) = Array(iCol, xlTextFormat)
        ' What's this? See VBA help for OpenText method (FieldInfo argument).
    Next iCol
    '// Open the file using the specified column formats
    Workbooks.OpenText _
            Filename:=strFilepath, _
            DataType:=xlDelimited, _
            ConsecutiveDelimiter:=False, Comma:=True, _
            FieldInfo:=varColumnFormat
End Sub

Usage:

OpenCsvAsText "C:\MyDir\MyFile.txt"

Comma-separated file is now open as Excel sheet with all columns formatted as text.

Note that @Wetmelon's wizard solution works just fine, but if you're opening many files then you may, like me, grow weary of, each time, scrolling to column 60 in order to Shift-Click it.

EDIT @GSerg states in the comment below that this "doesn't work" and "eats spaces and leading zeroes". I'll just quote the comment to the question, which is more descriptive:

For reasons unknown, even if you explicitly provide formats for all columns in VBA, Excel will ignore it if the file extension is CSV. As soon as you change the extension, that same code will yield the correct results.

So the code above "works", but gets killed by this ridiculous Excel behaviour. Whichever way you cut it, you're stuck having to change the extension to something other than ".csv", sorry! After that, you're home free.