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
    2014-10-09T13:42:03+00:00

    The importer is an off the shelf program. I am not the developer of that application.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-10-09T13:21:11+00:00

    See the discussion in Stop auto correction and auto formatting.  Danny Khen - Excel Program Manager - says "This feature is now in our list of desired features." so maybe in Excel 2015??

    here's an extract (my emphasis):

    SandraM12's post on February 15, 2013

    Excel likes to correct text that I type and to turn the text into dates, e.g. "2/2013" is turned into "Feb 2013". Unfortunately I'm not entering a date but something that could be viewed as a date, but it is in fact something else. So I want to turn off this auto formatting.

    Is it possible to turn this feature off on my computer?

    Danny Khen replied on  February 16, 2013

    Microsoft

    Reply In reply to SandraM12's post on February 15, 2013

    Thank you for your feedback. The short answer is - no at this time. The feature is designed with the assumption in most cases, when people type date-like strings (or time-like, or number-like), they would want them to be typed as that data type. Auto-formatting does more than formatting - it determines the type of the data, and that in turns typically gives better experience and functionality around the inpout that you typed (e.g. you can do arithmetic on numbers; you can sort dates by their calendar order; you cannot do all of this on text). For the minority of cases, like yours, where the date-like input is actually not dates, there are the two options that you mention. Formatting cells as text can be done in bulk (entire ranges, columns, rows or sheets), so should not be very time consuming, although of course it does take an extra step.

    Although this feature is not currently available in Excel, Microsoft is committed to continuously improving your experience with our products. This feature is now in our list of desired features.

    Danny Khen - Excel Program Manager

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-10-09T13:09:08+00:00

    The production of this Excel file is automated from another system. The plan is for the importer to pick this file up from a specific location and then to run automatically on a scheduled basis. This process happens on a customer site every day. My job is to automate the process which requires no human interaction so opening the spreadsheet and creating a second column and manually formatting that, is NOT an option.

    My job is to ensure this has no manual interaction at all.

    okay, so you are not adding the import profile to the Excel file; the profile is somewhere else and you needed to look in the XLS file just once to get the layout so you could set the import profile correctly.  You didn't need to save the XLS file.

    So what I said earlier:

    >>  So you have to use Excel to open, modify and save the XLS file

    >>  because you need to set up the import profile for the ODBC connection. 

    is completely wrong.

    In fact, Excel is not used at all!  One system is writing a file with an XLS extension in an Excel readable format.  A second system is using ODBC connectivity to read the XLS file and import the data.

    I  suggest you use a simple text editor like Notepad or Wordpad (not Word) to look at the XLS file as it comes from the first system.  It might be easier to do this if you make a copy and change the extension from XLS to TXT to avoid Windows using Excel.  Do you see the date/time the way you want it? If there are several columns in Excel you will probably find that the TXT file has TAB characters separating the columns.  You can set your ODBC to import from the text file even though the file extension is misleading.

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