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
    2016-03-22T14:16:41+00:00

    Ron,

    Thank you for your quick response. 

    Your suggestion works for the simple case I presented, but if you change it up a little where you are only replacing the last 4 digits, then there is no elegant (and by elegant I mean quickly-implemented) method to replace only the last 4 digits without the text-to-date conversion occurring. 

    I am the person in my organization that people turn to for help in converting, calculating and presenting data.  I've seen it all and nearly every batch of data is different and requires some sort of workaround.  There is no golden method that works from one data set to another.  It is generally not feasible to write VBA code to does something once that will likely never get used again (although I tend to try and write it generic enough to be mostly reusable). 

    The three most painful (time-consuming) "features" of Excel that I have never seen addressed are:

    1. The text to date conversion described in this thread,
    2. when converting Access data into formatted Excel data, fields that were blank in Access appear blank in Excel, but they are not (going the no-formatted route can cause Excel's conversion to Date, Exponent, etc. routines to occur); and
    3. Lastly the " ' " prefix itself.  There are no simple methods to get it there without hand entering the data.  And once you get it there if you manipulate the cell in any way, you can lose it.  Functions that work with the text will either strip it off or even worse, they may include it as the first character so everything shows up as   '2-1325, '1-1225, etc.

    In my world, there is very little hand entering of data.  Everything comes from somewhere, so copy/paste, import/export, etc are my friends.  I love Excel there are times when that love is painful.  And, yes, I do know that any comments posted here will not likely reach anyone at Microsoft, but these are things that I felt were worth reiterating because finding workarounds to them is one of the most time-consuming things I do.

    Again, thanks for your time.

    K. Brower

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-03-22T10:48:07+00:00

    K. Brower

       Oh, I agree it is very frustrating.  Unfortunately, this forum has little if any influence over MS development efforts.  And with all the requests here and elsewhere, I do not understand why this hasn't been made an option.  Having no influence over development, all I can do is offer workarounds. 

    The fact that Find/Replace also behaves this way is new information to me.  The only workaround I can see for that is to prefix the Replace part number with a single quote.  As with other methods of entering data, this forces Excel to treat the string as text by adding the text qualifier symbol at the beginning of the string.  It is not seen in the cell, but it can be seen in the formula bar.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-03-22T01:10:59+00:00

    Ron,

    This issue still exists in 2016 with Excel 2013.

    Copy and paste the following "Part Numbers" into a text file:

    1-2395

    2-2442

    1-1225

    2-2245

    3-1335

    1-1225

    2-2442

    1-1225

    Follow your own instructions above... The cells were pre-formatted as text, I used "Get External Data / From Text" and so forth, and I specified that the data should be imported as text.  As expected, the data imports into Excel properly.  Now use search and replace to change every instance of part number 1-1225 to 1-2125.

    End result:

    1-2395

    2-2442

    Jan-25

    2-2245

    3-1335

    Jan-25

    2-2442

    Jan-25

    The example data made it into Excel properly, and it ended up in a text only column.  However, search and replace took it upon itself to ignore all of that and convert it to a date even though you explicitly told it not to.

    This is a simple example.  But what happens when you multiply this times 20,000 records, 30 columns, 40 search and replace operations, 5 days per week, 50 weeks per year and 1,000s of power users?  You begin to see how the automatically-convert-anything-that-looks-remotely-like-a-date-into-a-date "specification" has frustrated the Excel user community. 

    I know there are workarounds for this.  If you ask 100 different users, you will likely get 100 different workarounds.  I've spent the pat 20 years of my career finding fast workarounds for getting data into and out of Excel.  Most of them are because of the data.  This issue is purely an Excel "feature" that cannot be disabled by users even though they should be allowed to.

    K. Brower

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