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
    2015-07-20T19:47:35+00:00

    I realize this is an old thread, and the question has been answered. In case anyone on the excel design team is listening, there are at least a couple of ways this could be handled that would satisify everyone (well, almost). 

    1, Ability to turn off the "date" datatype (or any other datatype you don't use) altogether.  Maybe most people writing 11/4 or 4-11 mean them as a dates, but in most of these cases plain text will do fine and guarantee they get it formatted the way they like. The only use I see for date as a special datatype is if you are plotting something against date, or subtracting two dates to get the number of days between (actually that could be useful).

    1. Allow user to vary the latitude taken when interpreting something as a date.  For people who almost never do mathematical operations on dates, it will be recognized as date only if explicitly formatted as such. Next level, only entries consisting of 3 numbers separated by two slashes will be recognized as a date unless explicitly so formatted. Finally what I think almost no-one wants, but what we have now,  anything that could possibly interpreted as a date by the wildest imagination, is.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-07-11T13:29:44+00:00

    We have had exactly the same problem with CAS registry numbers.

    No matter how we protect cells at some stage someone opens the spreadsheet with a version of Excel that ignores the "text" format and we end up with a compete mess. It is not even reversible.

    If you must use Excel then the best route is perhaps to store the CAS spread over three columns, optionally constructing it in the fourth.

    We are simply migrating from Excel for anything like this that has safety implications as we have wasted far too much time fixing the random mess that has routinely resulted from Microsoft's misguided attempts to be helpful.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-05-30T15:37:24+00:00

    Thanks for the response.  I stumbled on to this post after i was trying to do a lookup for a list of several hundred thousand lines of analytical results with CAS numbers from a list of several thousand CAS numbers and it I only wived on 22 of them.  as i was investigating further i found it was because potassium CAS 7440-09-7 was autoformatting to the date 9/7/7440.  Pretty random.

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