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
    2014-10-03T11:20:17+00:00

    Excel stores dates and times as days plus fractions of a day starting with 1Jan 1900.  So when you write you want to "remove the formatting while preserving the data that is physically held in there", formatting as General is how you do that.  The "data that is physically held there" is the 41911.37083

    Alternatively, you could select "Clear Formatting" which would result in the same thing.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-10-03T09:59:50+00:00

    I hate dealing with Excel. It constantlytries to be helpful and it invariably ruins the data I'm working with. I want a button that says "Stop trying to help me by changing my data".

    I get sent a file every day that requires importing into another system. I have no control over that file. I have a column called Date Received. In that column for example is a value that shows as:

    29/09/2014

    If I click on it, in the formula bar in Excel it shows that what is actually contained in the field is this:

    29/09/2014 08:54:00

    If I remove the formatting and put it as general, I get:

    41911.37083

    This is useless.

    If I save as a CSV, it saves what is displayed in the cell rather than what is actually there so I get:

    29/09/2014

    I want NO FORMATTING on that column. Nothing whatsoever.

    Tell me how I remove the formatting while preserving the data that is physically held in there?

    I consider this a bug in Office.

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-09-29T17:44:32+00:00

    Most of the contributors to this thread are agreed that Microsoft needs to change this behaviour on File,Open or at least give the user a configuration option to suppress it.

    You say "When I open a logfile".  At that point it is too late for data that isn't actually a date but looks like one.  Your case is different as the data is a date; your issue is with the formatting of the date.  You may find the format you want in the regional options; otherwise you can use the custom format:

    "YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss"

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