formatting when pasting into excel

[Don Hicks at MESD]

Hello,

Is there a way to affect the default formatting of information when it
is copied from an outside source and pasted into an Excel 2000 spreadsheet?

I recently copied some information from an HTML table for pasting into
Excel. The table contains a list of part numbers, some of which begin
with zeroes, others of which contain a few letters. In any instance
where the part number begins with a zero and has no letters, any leading
zeroes are truncated and the number is formatted as a number rather than
text.

Other data fields are misinterpreted as dates when pasted into Excel.

I would like to prevent this automatic formatting.

Is there a global default setting to Excel that I can change, or is
there any sort of "pre-preparation" I can make to a spreadsheet before
pasting into it?

 

[Guest]

hi,
this is a problem in excel. excel interpets numbers as
numbers and well why do you need leading zero?
usually you have to reformat the data to get the leading
zeros back.
"pre-preparation"? yes. you can format the target range to
text.