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
    2016-03-17T12:08:37+00:00

    There's nothing wrong with wanting that to happen.  But that is not something that this forum can accomplish.  So responses are mostly directed to helping others to deal with this unwanted feature.

    By the way, Auto Correct is a specific feature of Excel and can be turned off.  Unfortunately, this parsing of values that look like dates, into dates, is not a part of Auto-Correct. The AutoCorrect feature is used to correct typos and misspelled words, as well as to insert symbols and other pieces of text.

    There was a rumor that MS was going to program the toggling of the feature that converts input into dates in Excel 2016.  So far, I have not seen this occur.

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-03-17T13:22:08+00:00

    Rhetorically speaking, how many versions has Microsoft known about this; there is now just "rumor" of change?  I've been running into this for at least 9-10 years; you would think the "rumor" would have been started years ago.

    This thread exists because this company hasn't bothered to do anything about a problem they've known about. People are frustrated at the hacks needed because we are powerless to fix the source of the problem. 

    Way to go Microsoft.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-03-22T01:10:59+00:00

    Ron,

    This issue still exists in 2016 with Excel 2013.

    Copy and paste the following "Part Numbers" into a text file:

    1-2395

    2-2442

    1-1225

    2-2245

    3-1335

    1-1225

    2-2442

    1-1225

    Follow your own instructions above... The cells were pre-formatted as text, I used "Get External Data / From Text" and so forth, and I specified that the data should be imported as text.  As expected, the data imports into Excel properly.  Now use search and replace to change every instance of part number 1-1225 to 1-2125.

    End result:

    1-2395

    2-2442

    Jan-25

    2-2245

    3-1335

    Jan-25

    2-2442

    Jan-25

    The example data made it into Excel properly, and it ended up in a text only column.  However, search and replace took it upon itself to ignore all of that and convert it to a date even though you explicitly told it not to.

    This is a simple example.  But what happens when you multiply this times 20,000 records, 30 columns, 40 search and replace operations, 5 days per week, 50 weeks per year and 1,000s of power users?  You begin to see how the automatically-convert-anything-that-looks-remotely-like-a-date-into-a-date "specification" has frustrated the Excel user community. 

    I know there are workarounds for this.  If you ask 100 different users, you will likely get 100 different workarounds.  I've spent the pat 20 years of my career finding fast workarounds for getting data into and out of Excel.  Most of them are because of the data.  This issue is purely an Excel "feature" that cannot be disabled by users even though they should be allowed to.

    K. Brower

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