When opening a CSV file directly, Excel treats long numeric sequences as numbers and displays them using scientific notation. This treatment leads to a loss of precision when the number has more than 16 digits and to loss of information when digits at 16+ position are truncated. Even if apostrophes or double quotes are used as text qualifiers, the text within them is still recognized by Excel heuristics as a number and an additional formatting hint must be provided. This heuristics is known in Excel as the “General” format. One way to work around this limitation is to always open CSV files using the Excel’s multistep Text Import Wizard. The wizard enables you to set column formatting in the last step (“Text” format). Alternatively, you can use a different Office suite, for example LibreOffice, which always displays the import wizard when opening a CSV file.