Stop auto correction of number into a date

However much I appreciate you taking the side of MS and the free market, your examples only make limited sense.

Firstly, a service based market system, the manufacturer of course is "free" to make their tools any way they want, but if the manufacturer wants to maintain their position in the market, they better listen to their customers. If the manufacturer is not prepared to listen to his customers, he does not deserve to lead the market. Furthermore, I am not forcing anybody to anything, so your comment on slavery is completely out of place. I simply try to convince, which should be allowed in a society that pretends to have freedom of speech.

Secondly, if I had the skills to make my own tools, I would not waste time here, trying to get the manufacturer to repair a (obviously) very annoying flaw.. Everybody is not a programmer. On the other hand I can carry out complex molecular biology analyses and interpretation, which the people at MS cannot. Everybody cannot be a savant, and as long as we are dependent on each other, we better listen to each other as well.

Thirdly, if I have one column that contains dates, I don't need Excel to format those dates, since they will already be formatted as such. 

Fourthly, I appreciate the comment below stating that if the company one works in has subscribed to the MS office suit, one has fairly little choice, and I am not going to buy myself an expensive tool that will be incompatible with any thing my colleagues do. And since MS has managed, over the years, by making quality tools, to reach the top, and since everybody uses MS office, one institution is also not going to switch and be incompatible with the rest of the world. This is of course the bottom lime of the problem. Monopoly always leads to overpriced low quality tools. So all we are asking here is to go back to the original good quality that MS can produce. Too much to ask?

Finally, I did start using Excel 20 years ago, when this was not yet an issue.

So, Ron, I am wondering what your stakes are in this whole thing, since you are defending MS on a clear flaw of their software. Nothing you can say can convince me that I am doing wrong by complaining about a faulty feature, the improvement of which would improve the product itself. On the contrary, not doing so would be irresponsible at best.

I agree with Ralph.  Microsoft will miss out when customers get fed up and leave.  As observed earlier in the thread, the problems come from files from outside Excel. The data is corrupted by Excel when it converts text that could be a date but isn't into a number that it then displays as a date.  If you're working in a company that has Microsoft Office as standard and your colleagues are addicted to PowerPoint your options are severely limited.

Oh I understand your perspective quite well.  And I am not wedded to the status quo.  If there's a change, I will deal with it.  But my software purchases are based on what a program does today. And so far as this group is concerned, I try to help people work with the program Excel, as it exists today.

Bemoaning the fact that it doesn't work the way you, or I, might prefer, does not further that goal.  But I have no objection to anyone trying to make a case for change.  MS will make that decision, probably based on $$$$ considerations.  Clearly there are many who want what you do.  But unless MS feels it in the pocket, and recognizes that they would be better off by making the change, it won't happen.