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
    2014-10-29T15:39:12+00:00

    A few people seem to be giving this a pass saying that it makes sense for a slash (or dash) to indicate a date.  Which doesn't make sense to me.   Excel cell logic looks at a cell with a slash or dash and says "This is neither a string nor a number", and then needs to make a decision.   A few people here seem to think that parsing to date is a logical next step. 

    My problem with that is that does not follow the logic of most programming languages.  And excel cell logic should follow programming logic (it would sure make VBA a lot easier if it did....).   In programming, the logic would not be to interpret to a narrower datatype, but to go up the hierarchy to a more inclusive datatype, like a general var-type or whatever.  This would allow post-formatting to whichever type you wanted  without loss of data (which is what happens if it interprets to date and you try to reformat it back).

    There really is not a good reason for excel to operate the way it does in this situation.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-10-28T22:32:01+00:00

    This does not help. Still broken.

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-10-28T22:29:38+00:00

    From Microsoft: "It's not a bug, it's a feature."

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