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

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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.)

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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:¬)

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311 additional answers

Anonymous

2015-11-14T01:35:40+00:00

Brief testing suggests it works. But why not just import the values as text? As a matter of fact, one could write a routine which would not only copy and paste that data from the web page, but also include the hyperlink.
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Anonymous

2015-12-18T11:33:25+00:00

since microsoft wont help us, and they don't want to include ''button'' for turning of the auto date, end restore excel options here is one option that helped me at least with the date.

in region and language settings i switched the decimal symbol and the digit grouping.

so, now its is:

decimal symbol = .

digit grouping = ,

all my imported data is now without dates....
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Anonymous

2016-01-08T10:08:50+00:00

since microsoft wont help us, and they don't want to include ''button'' for turning of the auto date, end restore excel options here is one option that helped me at least with the date.

in region and language settings i switched the decimal symbol and the digit grouping.

so, now its is:

decimal symbol = .

digit grouping = ,

all my imported data is now without dates....

Hey,

I am having the problem that I am importing lists with thousands of rows of automation objects. These objects have addresses such as 4/5/66. Even though I am formatting the cells to text, Excel is still messing them up when I close the file and open it up again.

Anyone know any good alternatives to Microsoft Excel where you can turn off this ridiculous forced autoformatting?

-Marko
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