How do you turn off autoformatting?

[nickt]

I am making a spreadsheet that is essentially a record. In one of the
cells, I am entering the old/new values for something as 4/80, which
Excel instantly turns into April-80. I can format the the cell back to
General, but the number that results is not 4/80. And if I go in and
reset it to 4/80 again, the autoformatting kicks in again and the whole
process starts over. While there are plenty of ways I could work around
this, from changing the way I enter the data on up, it has become a
sort of matter of honor now. How the heck do I stop Excel from
overriding everything I enter?

 

[Anne Troy]

TEXT... 4/80 is TEXT, not General. If you format your whole column as TEXT,
then this should never occur again.
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Anne Troy
www.OfficeArticles.com