When I enter numbers, they show up as dates

[hungrypo]

I need to enter the following value: 1-99
Whever i enter it, excel changes it to Jan-99. I have tried formatting the
cell to the general format, different number formats, etc., but the same
thing keeps happening. I do not want to change the format to "text" in case
i need to make graphs/charts from the data. Any help would be much
appreciated. Thank you!

 

[Peo Sjoblom]

Precede them with an apostrophe ' or preformat the cell as text,
This helpfulness from Excel has always annoyed me guessing that anything
with a hyphen or a slash must be a date.

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Regards,


Peo Sjoblom

 

[hungrypo]

Thank you for your response. After pre-formatting the cell to text, will i
be able to change it to a number formatt afterwards and still keep the
numbers as entered?

 

[Peo Sjoblom]

No, because 1-99 is not a number according to Excel,
but I don't see why you would want to do that. The only reason
would be if you want to make numerical calculations and since
it is not a legit number in that regard it doesn't matter. If you need to
display
a string as numbers for display only text would be enough.
If you need it for some table where numbers between 1 and 99 should be
treated equally and then you have like 100-199 you need to put them into
separate cells like

1
99
199

and so on

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Regards,


Peo Sjoblom