Stop auto correction of number into a date

Anonymous
2010-04-09T11:08:55+00:00

When i work with excel, i do data entry, some of the numbers that i type in can be interpenetrated  as dates. when this happens excel automatically changes the format of the cell from general, to date. i want to be able to stop this auto correction.

I know there are a number of ways to avoid this happening, but i am fed up with these methods. i simply what to turn the auto correct off, so that instead of what i type into the cell changing, what i type into the cell shows exactly what i typed in.

really hope there is someone out the who knows how to do this.

thanks

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2010-04-09T17:09:58+00:00

If you format the cells as Text, all entries will be entered as text

(leading zeroes will be retain, date-like values won't be converted to dates, etc)

...CTRL+1 (to view the formatting dialog window)

...Select: Number_tab...Category: Text

That should resolve most (but not all) of the problem.

Does that work for you?

Ron Coderre

Microsoft MVP - Excel (2006 - 2010)

P.S. If any post answers your question, please mark it as the Answer (so it won't keep showing as an open item.)

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Anonymous
2010-04-09T16:55:47+00:00

Tim

I understand your frustration but this is not an autocorrect issue. 

Typing in 1/5 will automatically be recognised as a date as that is what it is unless... you signify that it is a formula and you expect the answer 0.2 to appear or it is a text item in which case you must preceed the data with a ' apostrophy.

In signifying the that the item is text you will have a data item which is left aligned, as all text is by default.  All other items in this column (even if purely numeric such as product codes) should aligned left.  Product codes though numeric should never be treaded like numbers, if you do, then expect issues.  Telephone numbers are similarly not true numbers, if they were treated as such, leading zeros would be dropped.

Though the whole idea of having to type in that extra character of ' is a pain to remember, it will make your data more acurate, reliable and portable.

Pat PS If you found this useful please vote. Thank you:¬)

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  1. Anonymous
    2017-01-10T17:55:16+00:00

    It's like you are asking how to turn off XT9 on your mobile device and being replied with suggestion to use more standard vocabulary or use full blown word processor application for text input.

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-01-09T11:51:30+00:00

    And some people just prefer to do things the hard way...

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-01-09T02:27:32+00:00

    "Some of us prefer using Excel for large data sets. Get over it."

    That is demagogy. We are NOT TALKING about databases here. We are talking about Excel. 

    CSV file I am passing to analysis package (which only accepts csv) coming from database with few billions of records. Exported flat table subset needs to be looked at and applied few regular expression tweaks including things which are too bulky and impractical to implement on sql side. Also SQL Server with acQuire frontend database exporter does not have formatting options to produce properly formatted csv 

    "That, is a database, and a poorly designed one" 

    Some free advice - you have no idea about database structure and tools people using - so please do not judge  others upfront. Have some respect even if you think you are smarter than all other

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