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

2012-08-19T17:22:14+00:00
Here is a case that might not prove anything more than the idiocy of how Microsoft developers are instructed to spend their efforts to improve Excel. I am trying to copy a table of data from this web page into excel 2007. Here are the various methods I used, of which none have worked satisfactorily. Yes, these are football statistics for a weekend project I'm screwing around with. The point is still the same regardless of the type of data.
1. I tried manual copy and paste, which looked nice at first, but the cells were all HTML formatted and numbers could not be used in formulas.
2. I tried copy and paste special, but HTML formatting could not be removed, so numbers were still not being treated as numbers. There was no longer a Paste Values option, just some Unicode/HTML stuff that didn't seem to do anything.
3. I tried to import the data, using Data > From Web. This seemed like quite a useful tool. I entered the URL from the above hyperlink. Clicked on the arrow next to the main table on that page. Clicked Import. Clicked Properties.
a) Tried it with "Preserve Cell Formatting" both checked and unchecked and onto the current worksheet with the sheet's cells preformatted to Text. The pre-formatting vanished. All columns containing hyphen separated numbers within date-like range still came across as dates, i.e. 2-2 is now 2-Feb. There was no "Wizard" to force items to text on the way in.

b) Tried with "Preserve Cell Formatting" both checked and unchecked and onto a new worksheet. Same problem.
1. I tried manually copying and pasting into a text file, then saved as a .csv file. I opened with Excel. All the data showed up in the first column, so I selected it, used Data > Text to Columns with Tab delimiting to arrange it into columns, but with Text pre-formatting in the "Wizard." Guess what? This worked. It was quite a pain to do this for all the different web pages I was interested in extracting data from though. This solution is flat out not practical for larger web queries.
It's unfortunate that Microsoft spent the money and effort developing this "From Web" interfacing option to extract online tables directly into Excel, and I can't use it because of Excel's draconian auto-formatting rule. Instead I was 1 for 4, 1-4, or maybe I should say 4-Jan, copying and pasting into text files and finding awkward, time-consuming work arounds that might not be sufficient next time around.

There's always Open Office.
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Anonymous

2012-08-19T18:22:56+00:00
D Schultz,

I tried the web page you gave a link for, using the following method (Excel 2007):
- new workbook
- select A1 of sheet1
- Data tab > From Web button in Get External Data group
- pasted the web page address in Address box & click Go button
- once web page loaded, selected arrow next to main table (just above 'Name' column header)
- before clicking Import, click Options (top right), then select Disable date recognition (near the bottom) > OK
- click Import button
- click OK in Import Data dialog
Result was I got a couple of extra blank columns, but the hyphenated scores were all retained.

Does this work for you?

___________

Regards, Tom
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Anonymous

2012-08-19T22:25:07+00:00
D Schultz,

I tried the web page you gave a link for, using the following method (Excel 2007):

new workbook

select A1 of sheet1

Data tab > From Web button in Get External Data group

pasted the web page address in Address box & click Go button

once web page loaded, selected arrow next to main table (just above 'Name' column header)

before clicking Import, click Options (top right), then select Disable date recognition (near the bottom) > OK

click Import button

click OK in Import Data dialog

Result was I got a couple of extra blank columns, but the hyphenated scores were all retained.

Does this work for you?

___________

Regards, Tom
This worked perfectly. Thanks.
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