1. The process could also be automated, so that you don't have to do the conversions manually. In any event, if you changed the separators from tildes to the more standard commas or tabs, the problem might go away of its own accord.

2. When you use Excel's text to columns tool, you can specify the format for each column. You can prevent 1234567890123456 changing to 1234567890123450 by specifying the 'text' format for that column.

3. If this problem has only recently started happening, something has changed in your working environment - either Office has developed a fault or some other aspect of your system has been changed (e.g. you've started using tildes instead of commas or tabs for the separators).

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]