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
    2014-04-16T20:10:02+00:00

    You need to ensure that Excel is properly interpreting the dates coming from LabVIEW.  Assuming those dates are consistent, you will need to IMPORT the file, and use the Text Wizard to ensure the date information is properly parsed.  This can be automated in VBA.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-04-16T19:41:44+00:00

    Hi. I am having issues with this problem.

    I am a developer interfacing with excel by NI Report Toolkit for LabVIEW. In some machines it auto-formats the date and shows it as General and shows up like 41824,47633 instead of display as a dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm 

    But this is not the worst part of it. Withnonstanding the fact of my Locale is correctly configured to Brazil, it just ignores it and get my dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm string and interprets it like mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm and then shows it as seconds. 

    This issue happens only when the excel autoformats the date, and for some strange reason the same does not happen in my developer machine, which keeps all data in General as text.This issue is giving me headaches, and I am really frustrated to have to invert the dd mm to work in the final user computer, and in my computer will not work.

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-03-18T04:31:35+00:00

    [cut]

    Other similar problems would be the strange time and ratio format auto change.

    When I am inputing ratios, it auto formats the ratio into time or into a decimal number.

    Which is completely stupid.

    1:75 strangely converts to 0.09375, which is not 1/75 or 0.01333.  I have no idea how did the number 0.09375 appeared, or how it can help me in my work, I can't think of a common reason for it to change like that at all.

    but 4:5 is changed to 4:05.

    [cut]

    Hi MS,

    Excel interprets the colon as a time separator and therefore reads 1:75 as 1 hour and 75 minutes, normally expressed as 2:15 or 2.25 hours in decimal parlance. Therefore, in the absence of an explicit time format, Excel will display 1:75 as the decimal portion of a day, i.e 2.25/24 or  0.09375 . If you format the cell with an hh:mm format, you will see 2:15 displayed.

    ===

    Regards,

    Norman

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