How to prevent Excel from formatting Dates ?

[Guest]

I am pasting the following cell into Excel, and I'd like Excel to NOT try to
format it as dates:
08/03/2006

Excel's default behaviour seems to be "oh, this looks like a date, I'll
screw up the formatting", and I end up with 08-03-06 in my cells.

How can make sure that whatever I paste, Excel will be nice enough and just
consider it all text, no matter if it looks like a date or not.

(The only workaround I have is to paste in Notepad, and the use the import
wizard in Excel to set each column to text. A pain in the ***)

Thanks for any help

 

[Leo Heuser]

I am pasting the following cell into Excel, and I'd like Excel to NOT try
to
format it as dates:
08/03/2006

Excel's default behaviour seems to be "oh, this looks like a date, I'll
screw up the formatting", and I end up with 08-03-06 in my cells.

How can make sure that whatever I paste, Excel will be nice enough and
just
consider it all text, no matter if it looks like a date or not.

(The only workaround I have is to paste in Notepad, and the use the import
wizard in Excel to set each column to text. A pain in the ***)

Thanks for any help

Start entering with a single quote (') or format the cell as text *before*
entering data.

 

[Guest]

I'm pasting 5,000 to 40,000 lines with many columns.
Can I format the whole empty spreadsheet as text before pasting ? How ?

 

[Guest]

Sure! Select all cells (click on the top left corner of the sheet) and format
cells as text!
Regards,
Stefi


„Pat†ezt írta:

 

[Guest]

Cool ! I can't believe it was so easy.

Thanks to both.

 

[Leo Heuser]

Cool ! I can't believe it was so easy.

Thanks to both.

You're welcome.

Leo Heuser

 

[Guest]

Be careful when you make the entire worksheet as text. If there is other
data that needs to be recognized as integers for calculation purposes, it
could cause problems downstream.