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
    2014-10-09T09:28:54+00:00
    1. XLS
    2. I don't have to open it at all however, to set up the import profile I must open it and it is there I noticed how Excel is formatting things. One example is that the data should be dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm:ss which, when you click on the cell, it is right down to the second but it is displayed without. Excel does this whether you like it or not unless you pre-formatted the column, which I can't do as I get given the spreadsheet. When you pull the data in using the importer using Excels ODBC connection, you pull the data out and the seconds are not extracted because it pulls the data from the cell as it is displayed which means my import data loses the granularity of the seconds. As this data is compiled from the transactions in hundreds of ATM machines across the world, there are many thousands of rows of data and I need to track the transaction time down to the second. Thanks to Excel, I can't.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-10-08T17:12:42+00:00

    Ok, I think I need to explain this is really simple terms. I have no control over the spreadsheet that is produced. It is produced by another system; one that I don't have access to or any control whatsoever over. It is a spreadsheet. It is there. It is given to me AS IS. This part of the process is automated and I have to work with what that system spits out which is a spreadsheet.

    Does that clarify things?

    1.  The spreadsheet you receive.  What format is it in (XLS, XLSX, CSV, TXT, ...)?
    2.  The next part of the process.   Why do you have to open the spreadsheet?

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-10-06T15:46:33+00:00

    Sorry, I misunderstood.  I thought your problem was how to get a value in a desired format into a CSV document.

    You wrote:  Now, back to the spreadsheet I receive that already contains my data, how can I remove the changes that Excel kindly makes to it and leave the data as it was entered?

    The answer is that you cannot do that.

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