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

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments
Answer accepted by question author
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.)

Was this answer helpful?

60+ people found this answer helpful.
0 comments
Answer accepted by question author
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:¬)

Was this answer helpful?

40+ people found this answer helpful.
0 comments

311 additional answers

Sort by: Newest
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2016-06-16T15:39:52+00:00

    I completely agree with you.  I am dealing with almost a million rows of data in excel, which is not much. But when excel assumes that 1/3 of the data in a column is "Date" related and converting those values and you have NO EASY WAY OF FIXING IT, it **** me OFF!

    The funny thing is that excel already has an option that when you have a column full of similar formulas, and if one of the formulas is inconsistent with the majority of the column, it will give you a small error asking if you would like to change it.

    Now, if I have column with thousands of rows, why would you automatically convert the small number of rows into a date value, if it's not consistent with the majority of the data. I don't get it.

    Anyways, the UTF format solves my problem in my situation(1 excel file with a lot of data), hopefully Microsoft comes up with a better solution.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2016-06-16T09:20:16+00:00

    This is a good idea, one of the better ones even, but it is still a time-consuming workaround. If someone has to input 1000 files then copying them to Notepad 1000 times is still not a satisfying solution. There are hundreds ways to work around this problem, but they all cost time - and money. The real problem is that this should not be nessecary.

    This is not a historic steam engine from the 19th century in a museum. If I was a museum warden and I operated one of those things, I could easily understand why you have to do workarounds to get that thing to do what I want. But this is a software product from 2016 that I pay quite a lot of money for on a yearly basis, private and way more business. It would be extremely easy to include a "Don't convert my data" option into Excel, but the programmers just refuse. And I just cannot understand why they don't do it. Arrogance of having a monopoly I assume - it reminds me of the time when Internet Explorer refused to do something about the popups...

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2016-06-13T17:19:19+00:00

    Hi So I just figured out how to fix your problem, I had to make an account just to answer this because I don't think someone gave you the answer you were looking for. 

    What you do is the following:

    Whatever source you are coping into excel, in my case I was copying my source from an SQL database, and one of the columns contained rows that started with jun1065, mar1598, sep1478, and Excel would automatically turn these into dates. PRETTY ANNOYING TBH. So what you do is copy the data into a text editor. I used 'Notepad'. Once it is in notepad you are going to save it to whatever name you like, here is the Key part:

    In the encoding option, the default is ANSI, you are going to change it to ***UTF-8*** ****

    After this is done, you can close the text editor, you are going to open excel, and open a new document. You go to the location of the document and switch the 'All excel Files' to 'All files', now you will be able to see your text document that contains all of your data. When you open your text document. it will show you the Text Import Wizard menu and you chose the options you want for delimited or fixed with. **The file origin should already be in UTF-8**

    Click next, choose the delimiters options you want, (in my case separate by tab).

    Click next and in column date format, I chose General and then FINISH.

    And that's it!

    All of your data should be formatted as you want it now, without excel changing the some data to dates automatically.

    Hope this works for you!

    Thanks,

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments