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
    2013-11-21T04:14:30+00:00

    I Agree with MikeWhoCares... and his tone is justified.  This is clearly a bug or bad design in Excel.  All data should be treated as a STRING by default unless a user has specified otherwise.  This way Excel should interpred data for exactly what it is

    • as it's been entered by the user.  Automatically changing data based on assumptions is bad UX design and worse still - there really is no way to stop Excel from doing this - it forces the user to make repeated actions to circumvent the issue.  The correct answer is exactly this - there is no way to do it and it's a problem with Excel.  If Microsoft was to do UX testing and write user stories for it's software it would know about this issue.  Never assume anything about the data a user enters!  Let them decide what it is!  Or give them the option to enable / disable the "automatic changing of the data type or formatting" or whatever that annoyance is called.

    When answering peoples questions it's not helpful to side step around the issues at all it's better to be direct and honest even if it's derogatory or detrimental to Microsoft (or whoever else makes badly designed software lol).

    Answer is no. Plain and simple. No.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-10-17T14:12:49+00:00

    It does appear that Microsoft never reads these postings (when was there ever a response from anyone there), so does anyone know how to make a formal request to Microsoft to fix this problem, a request which would result in some sort of formal reply?  You get the distinct impression that MS hosts this site simply as a way of diverting unwanted input into a black hole.  There has to be a way of getting a response from them, surely.

    Ian

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-10-17T13:48:05+00:00

    I am in complete agreement with your frustration.  I pull data from our main system into a CSV file.  This populates part codes with the leading apostrophe.  I use text to columns to remove the apostrophe so that I can then use the data in the files to interact with each other using VLOOKUPS (this feature does not work with the leading apostrophe in my experience).  If I remove the apostrophe from the part codes so that I can use VLOOKUP, some get turned into dates, EVEN if I already have the column formatted as TEXT ONLY.  The perception of date by excel overrides the text only formatting that I have in the column.  I then have to go to that individual cell, reformat as text only again, and manually re-key the correct part number in the cell.  This takes an enormous amount of time when working with very large files and also leaves lots of room for keying mistakes.  And I also completely agree that this thread is four years old, and nothing has been done to address it when clearly it causes frustration for many users working in business environments.  Microsoft, please hear our cries and create a way to easily disable this feature when working with certain files.  Just a simple little check box, surely is an easy fix for your programming geniuses. Please!!

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