put quotes around a field

An apostrophe in the beginning of the cell will do this.

'"test"

Your sheet reminded me of another person here who asked a similar question and had data that looked similar to yours. To see the solutions offered to him (maybe some of these apply to your situation as well), see here:

https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/26966853/how-to-get-quotes-around-text-in-excel.html

Works fine for me when I copy (Ctrl+C) cell F4 and paste (Ctrl+V) into Notepad.

Are you trying to export the data?  If you do that, Excel may add extra quotes to make it CSV-compatible.

Yes I am trying to export the data. I would be happy if Excel added quotes before I use the formulas above but it does not at that point. Maybe it is doing that after I add the quotes. I want to have just a single set of quotes when saving it as a csv file and then opening it in notepad.
Thanks.

I think the problem is that without the quotes, Excel realizes that they are not needed.
With the quotes, Excel realizes that (in order to retain the original quoted data) it needs to put extra quotes around the items.

There may be a setting to tell Excel to force quotes around items when you export them, but I know of nothing like that.

However, it would be easy enough to do in VBA if you'd like to try that (although defining the parts to export will be the difficulty.)

i want to put quotes around every field. is it hard to do that in vba?
Thanks

Use this macro to place quotes around the text in the selected cells:

Public Sub QuoteText()

    Dim Cell As Range
    For Each Cell In Selection
        Cell.Value = """" & Cell.Value & """"
    Next Cell

End Sub

Kevin

Hi. That put triple quotes on the fields but thanks anyway.

What the heck are you running over there? ;-)

The code puts two double quotes around whatever text is in the cell. If there is already a quote then that quote is included and you will get more quotes than you want. Once the data is quoted, your formulas will also produce extra quotes because they will now be quoting already quoted text.

Try putting in some plain text strings in some unused cells and running the macro on them. You will see the desired results.

Kevin

I ran the macro on all the text fields (and deleted the formulas since they are not needed any more) and produced the desired results.

See the attached workbook.

Kevin
quotetest.xls

A simple way in VBA would be something like this:

 

Private Sub CreateFile()
    On Error GoTo CreateFile_Err
      
    Dim strPath As String
    Dim iFileNumber As Integer
    Dim iRow As Integer
    Dim iColumn As Integer
    
    strPath = Environ("Temp")
    iFileNumber = FreeFile()
    Open strPath & "\MyFile.CSV" For Output As #iFileNumber
    iRow = 3
    Do Until Cells(iRow, 1).Value = ""
      For iColumn = 1 To 5
        If iColumn > 1 Then
          Print #iFileNumber, ",";
        End If
        Print #iFileNumber, Chr(34) & Replace(Cells(iRow, iColumn).Value, vbLf, " *** ") & Chr(34);
      Next iColumn
      Print #iFileNumber, ""
      iRow = iRow + 1
    Loop
    
CreateFile_Exit:
    Close #iFileNumber
    
    MsgBox "File saved as " & strPath & "\MyFile.CSV"
    Exit Sub
  
CreateFile_Err:
    MsgBox "error found during save: " & Err.Description
    Resume CreateFile_Exit
End Sub

Select allOpen in new window

The only problem is that I see your data in column E containing multiple lines.  I "merged" these into a single line where each new line is replaced by "***"

I'll have to see how the CSV standard supports multiple lines, but otherwise this code should handle it for you (although you may want to change the path and the file name (plus the number of columns if more than 5.)
Also, I am assuming that your data does NOT contain any quotes, otherwise we'd have to double-the quotes as you saw with Excel's export.

Here are the file and the resulting file. quotetest.csv quotetest2.csv

Based on the original file you supplied, you obviously didn't run my code.
So what are you trying to show us now?

this is the result of the first macro posted.