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

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
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.)

Was this answer helpful?

60+ people found this answer helpful.
0 comments
Answer accepted by question author
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:¬)

Was this answer helpful?

40+ people found this answer helpful.
0 comments

311 additional answers

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2013-10-09T16:17:03+00:00

    Sorry, not buying your answer.  Bottom line is that there are a wide variety of data types which are NOT text but which Excel will convert to text under a number of circumstances regardless of how users ACTUALLY want their data to be handled.  While pre-formatting cells, typing additional apostrophes, or using the import wizard may work in some instances, this in no way affects the text to column issue: I formatted all cells in my workbook as text, performed text to columns on delimited data, and excel converted the CAS number for potassium (7440-09-7) into a date (September 7, 7440).  Hands up everyone who regularly uses dates over 5,000 years in the future!!!!!

    Sure I can use find/replace to add an apostrophe after each of my delimiters, but this doesn't work well either.  Sure, excel doesn't reformat the CAS number to a date, but the apostrophe shows up in the cell because "7440-09-7" does not look like a number to excel (I get "'7440-09-7").  I then format the cell as "text", and use find/replace to remove the apostrophes: guess what happens?  Yup, you got it; excel CHANGES the format of the cell to "date" and I'm left with "9/7/7440".  Sure, I can manually delete the apostrophe, but that's pretty tiresome if I'm dealing with a few thousand cells.  The only "automatic" way to do this that I've found is to:

    1. add a junk character (such as an apostrophe) following each delimiter to prevent Excel from converting to a date
    2. run text to columns
    3. use "=RIGHT(B1,LEN(B1)-1)" to remove the junk character
    4. insert a new column and format that column as text
    5. paste the output of the RIGHT function as values.

    Sure, more often than not I DO want Excel to autoformat dates (it's handy to be able to type "1/1/05" rather than "January 1, 2005" or the numeric equivalent "38353").  However, there are DEFINITELY times when this sort of behavior is NOT appropriate.  And personally I feel that the the find/replace function (and the text-to-columns function for that matter) changing a user-specified cell format IS a bug.

    It's also sad that this thread has been going on for almost four years now.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2013-10-01T18:52:43+00:00

    So, at least in Excel 2010, you can right-click on the cell (or row or column or whatever), go to "Format Cells," and choose "Fraction" from the list of cell types. That will keep 4/11, for example, from turning into 11-Apr.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2013-09-20T16:47:47+00:00

    Jiminspace, that's why I started using OpenOffice Calc to handle my CSV files. Works flawlessly. Much happier now.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments