Stop auto correction of number into a date

Anonymous

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

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments

Answer accepted by question author

Anonymous

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.)

0 comments

Answer accepted by question author

Anonymous

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:¬)

0 comments

311 additional answers

Anonymous

2014-10-09T12:12:13+00:00

The production of this Excel file is automated from another system. The plan is for the importer to pick this file up from a specific location and then to run automatically on a scheduled basis. This process happens on a customer site every day. My job is to automate the process which requires no human interaction so opening the spreadsheet and creating a second column and manually formatting that, is NOT an option.

My job is to ensure this has no manual interaction at all.
Was this answer helpful?

0 comments No comments
Anonymous

2014-10-09T12:46:17+00:00

since the original file has the proper information, you will need to alter the importer.
Was this answer helpful?

0 comments No comments
Anonymous

2014-10-09T13:09:08+00:00

The production of this Excel file is automated from another system. The plan is for the importer to pick this file up from a specific location and then to run automatically on a scheduled basis. This process happens on a customer site every day. My job is to automate the process which requires no human interaction so opening the spreadsheet and creating a second column and manually formatting that, is NOT an option.

My job is to ensure this has no manual interaction at all.

okay, so you are not adding the import profile to the Excel file; the profile is somewhere else and you needed to look in the XLS file just once to get the layout so you could set the import profile correctly. You didn't need to save the XLS file.

So what I said earlier:

>> So you have to use Excel to open, modify and save the XLS file

>> because you need to set up the import profile for the ODBC connection.

is completely wrong.

In fact, Excel is not used at all! One system is writing a file with an XLS extension in an Excel readable format. A second system is using ODBC connectivity to read the XLS file and import the data.

I suggest you use a simple text editor like Notepad or Wordpad (not Word) to look at the XLS file as it comes from the first system. It might be easier to do this if you make a copy and change the extension from XLS to TXT to avoid Windows using Excel. Do you see the date/time the way you want it? If there are several columns in Excel you will probably find that the TXT file has TAB characters separating the columns. You can set your ODBC to import from the text file even though the file extension is misleading.
Was this answer helpful?

0 comments No comments