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
    2013-01-30T20:39:50+00:00

    Sorry, but it's pretty well essential to be able to import csv files easily and safely to Excel. (The difficulty in Excel of easily changing the field delimiter on export is another story...)

    Excel should not make re-formatting decisions without explicit permissions, and the issue of auto-date conversion has been around now for over a decade.  It has been driving me bananas.  Does MS pay NO attention to it's users at all?  Does no one from MS read these postings?  - If so they seem strangely reluctant to comment.  Excel is a great product - so why doesn't MS listen to those of us who use it heavily?

    Ian

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-01-22T09:30:59+00:00

    Hi,

    IMHO, csv file should not be associated with Excel but only to a text editor program, eg Notepad or wordpad, thus avoiding any possible auto formatting and data corruption.

    When opening a csv file using the same method as a text file should allow you, during the import wizard steps, to format any or all column of data as text.

    As a final step, save the csv files as Excel that will THEN retained all applyed formatting

    HTH

    JY

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-01-22T03:51:05+00:00

    I know this thread is old but I just needed to vent and this looked like a decent place to do it.  I am absolutely fed up with this "feature."  We use IDs that are initials followed by numbers.  So IDs like APR5143 get autoformatted as dates.  ARGH.  Who ever thought that on opening a CSV file it would be a smart idea to look through a column of what is obviously random text strings and pick out the 3 or 4 that happen to have something date-like in them and change them.  And, of course, if you don't happen to think about this (open a csv file, make a quick change and save it back out) then you are lost -- no way of getting back the original data.

    This is insane.  There has to be a way to turn off this autoformatting.  Microsoft?

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