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
    2014-03-18T03:16:30+00:00

    I think I may have found a solution... Under Excel Options > Formulas there is a section called "Error checking rules". In there is a box called "Cells containing years represented as 2 digits". I deselected that, and so far it seems to have helped. Not sure if it will work for importing data, but at least it stopped changing what I type in...

    Nope, 1/4 still changes to 1 April(or whatever your language settings tells it to change into your language's display, tried English and Chinese)

    11/4, 4/11, whatever looks like day and month changes.

    Other similar problems would be the strange time and ratio format auto change.

    When I am inputing ratios, it auto formats the ratio into time or into a decimal number.

    Which is completely stupid.

    1:75 strangely converts to 0.09375, which is not 1/75 or 0.01333.  I have no idea how did the number 0.09375 appeared, or how it can help me in my work, I can't think of a common reason for it to change like that at all.

    but 4:5 is changed to 4:05.

    It'd be nice to have an option to turn the auto change off, but it'd be equally important to keep things consistent and clear, which MS is not doing in Excel.

    And I can't believe MS just doesn't face the problem for years, I'm sure a lot of people have complaint about this stupid feature which is not helping at all, I am not a frequent user of Excel for data, but I have seen this problem a few times already in a year, and changing it to text does not work for me since I'd have to change each cell manually to text and align them to the right.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-03-15T01:15:14+00:00

    I think I may have found a solution... Under Excel Options > Formulas there is a section called "Error checking rules". In there is a box called "Cells containing years represented as 2 digits". I deselected that, and so far it seems to have helped. Not sure if it will work for importing data, but at least it stopped changing what I type in...

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-03-10T17:04:24+00:00

    It would be very nice if this actually worked, but it does not. 

    No autocorrect options are selected.  

    Force the cells to be any format you wish  (except text, which always is right or Date which we avoid like the plauge)....general, number, etc...

    now type 3/10 ...... even with autoformat turned off, it will autoformat that into a date every time. 

    If I cannot stop this, then I cannot stop the more frustrating ones, especially with imports. 

    We need to turn this feature off completely.

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