Getting Excel to not try to coerce numbers to Date

[R Avery]

I have a problem that plagues me persistently:

Whenever I enter what i consider ranges in a single cell ("1 - 30"),
Excel will interpret that as Jan-30. I do not want this behavior. I
wish Excel to format things as date ONLY if i Explicitly tell it that
the value is a date (if, for example, i format the cell as Date format
or enter something like "4/30/2004").

Is there anyway that I toggle off this behavior? Any help would be most
appreciated.

 

[Tom Ogilvy]

Format the cell as text before you make the entry.

or

preceded the value with a single quote

'1-30

 

[Guest]

-----Original Message-----
I have a problem that plagues me persistently:

Whenever I enter what i consider ranges in a single cell ("1 - 30"),
Excel will interpret that as Jan-30. I do not want this behavior. I
wish Excel to format things as date ONLY if i Explicitly tell it that
the value is a date (if, for example, i format the cell as Date format
or enter something like "4/30/2004").

Is there anyway that I toggle off this behavior? Any help would be most
appreciated.
.

you might want to make sure that you have that cell
formatted as "general".

 

[Tom Ogilvy]

that would ensure the Excel does what it is doing now.

 

[R Avery]

These are two suggestions that I follow (by necessity) all the time.
The reason why I would like this is because I often open up a text file
from Excel and many of the "1 - 30" or "2 - 5" are in random cells and i
do not wish to format everything as text.

Are you saying that there is no way to force Excel not to coerce these
strings to Dates?

 

[Tom Ogilvy]

That is what I am saying.

if opening a text file, the import wizard allows you to specify a column as
Text, so you could specify all your columns as text.