Transfer Codes starting with the symbol = (1.Viewing)

I use Godaddy for a lot of my domains and they have a neat feature where you can download a spreadsheet of all your domains. You can customize the fields and if you download all of the fields it is shocking how much information it contains about each domain.

You can download the spreadsheet with or without the transfer codes which are placed in the last field if you request them.

I hate having a transfer code that starts with the = sign and I think it should be abolished as the first character in transfer codes. The spread sheets looks at it as a command and shows it as an error.

So every time I look at my spreadsheet I see a few errors unless I put something in front of the = sign but then the transfer code is no longer accurate.

Third world problems, I know but nonetheless problematic

Use find/replace in Excel, which should solve that in a few seconds.

Well, I'm not sure how that would work. Find/Replace can't match ONLY equal signs at the front of a string. And you'd want to retain the actual auth code that includes the =, not get rid of, change it, nor prefix it with a single quote either...

You _should_ be able to simply change the formatting of the cell to text and excel should then _not_ try and interpret it as anything but literal text only. But it doesn't, unfortunately. In my version of excel, I can create a new column, format it first as text, then I can type =lksdjflskdfjlskj in a cell and it doesn't interpret it as a formula. This leads you to believe that if you formatted a blank column as text, then special pasted the column as text into the newly text formatted column, that it would do exactly that. But for me, that doesn't work either. Hand typing in the text formatted cells interprets it as only text like you'd expect (not interpreting it as a formula). But "special paste" as text pastes it, but then it still interprets the equal sign as a formula again. Counter-intuitive and frankly frustrating. I'm using an older version of excel on my mac, maybe the latest version has fixed that?
That method might at least be worth a try Frank....