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
    2014-09-13T18:36:42+00:00

    There are other solutions with regard to the auto-date-conversion issue than the two you mention.  And what to use may depend on what these strings represent.

    One solution with regard to dealing with a CSV file, the "solution" is to IMPORT the file rather then OPENing the file.  On 2007+ you will find that facility on the Data ribbon/ Get External Data tab / From Text

    This will open the Text Import wizard where you can specify to import that column as text.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-09-13T16:33:40+00:00

    So what I get is that there are two ways to solve this problem:

    1. Format to text
    2. add ' before to autoformat to text

    NEITHER WORK FOR ME...

    I am opening a CSV file WHICH DOES NOT SAVE FORMATTING

    I tried CONCATENATE(',A1) for all values but they still get reconverted to time and date when I reopen the .csv file. (Also I dont want someone I am working for to have to do this for all their data).

    Is there anyway, without changing for example 14:0, to not have it change t0 14:00 in a CSV File?

    This is why an excel option to turn off auto-formatting of cells would be nice...

    I dont want to run a MACRO everytime I open the CSV file and have the person Im working for have to learn anything fancy...

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-08-23T11:45:38+00:00

    I had the same issue and came to this page looking for answers. What I just came up with as a work around was to use the backslash instead of the forward slash, and it appears to have worked. I was trying to copy data over from another source, so before I copied it, I did a replace all "/" with "". Hope that helps.

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