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
    2016-08-05T13:51:33+00:00

    It affects me all the time, and I am not using excel as a database.

    I live in Germany so the date format is 1.12 for 1st December. The numerical data that I am trying to represent or manipulate (so the correct use for Excel) comes from an american tool, that exports in csv. Being an american tool the data is of the form 1.12, wonderful (Germans use the komma as the decimal seperator).

    If I forget to set this then I have problems. A nice work around is to set the decimal to the american/british point. However this then gives problems when I get data of some sort from a german source, as numbers are recognised as text. Great.

    It's just annyoing having to set excel up in the correct way for my data every time. When all that would really be needed is the option to turn of the auto-format, as one can turn off almost every other auto function

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-07-30T18:57:07+00:00

    Huh? There is nothing specifically related to office 2013. The autocorrect behavior still exists in all versions.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-07-30T18:24:43+00:00

    Microsoft denies this issue and is ignorant. Till excel 2013, this bug still exists :(

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