How to deal with leading zeros

[PlaybackArcade]

At the start of 2019 exported all inventory to a CSV to clear out all sold items (We are a Video Game store and every game has its own SKU). When I had imported back to Square, all "Leading Zeros" were deleted while they are still on the physical barcode on the game. Is there any way to add the zeros back to square (if I have the first exported CSV) or is there any way to get the barcode scanner to ignore the leading zeros (using a Socket Mobile 7ci Scanner)? Thanks.

[GlassJudy]

Are the leading zeroes showing up in the .csv file?  This happened to me when I first tried exporting my data, and I finally tracked it down to the program mistakenly formatting that particular column as numeric, so that the leading zeroes were dropped.  If this is what's happening to you, look carefully at the formatting in that column and make it so it's text instead of numeric.

There may be other reasons why you're experiencing this, but that was what happened to me.

[wtdLani]

In case no one responded to you privately -- for leading zeros the answer is:

Export as EXCEL file -- NOT as CSV.   Excel knows that the leading zero numbers are "numbers stored as text"

If you export as CSV, it treats everything as numbers and kills off the leading zeros.  AAAAH.

And -- sorry but there is no way to get them back and there is no simple way to tell your system which SKU used to have them.

[wtdLani]

Ok -- more information.  I lied. 

You CAN use CSV as the Export -- but you have to be much more careful at several steps in the process.   The problem happens when you OPEN that CSV file in another program, i.e. Excel or GoogleSheets, at which point those programs autoconvert the SKUs with leading zeros to simple numbers -- and kill off your zeros. UNLESS you are careful during the import.

For Excel, it will autoconvert if you simply doubleclick to open the file.  BUT if you do an actual file IMPORT, you can still control the format of each column (a bit of a hassle).  

Similarly, but a bit more simple -- if/when you import into GoogleSheet, you still need to do file import -- but there is a single checkbox that asks -- "Convert text to numbers, dates and formulas"  __ Yes   __ No.  

PICK NOOOOOOO.

Or you can simply do follow the mantra...Export EXCEL, Import Excel.  A bit easier.