I want quarters not months

[LiveUser]

I have a cell that I would like to enter 02/2008 referring to quarter/year.
Everytime I enter the information Excel changes it to Month and year. If I
format the cell for general information it changes it numbers.

Is there a quarter option?

No months will be entered into this cell. Just quarters and years.

 

[Peo Sjoblom]

Precede the entry with an apostrophe ' or format the cell(s) as text before
typing


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Regards,


Peo Sjoblom

 

[LiveUser]

Is there any other way? This will be filled out from a lot of different
people and I am trying to keep it very simple, preferably pre-formatted.

 

[Peo Sjoblom]

Then you need preformatted as text, dates in Excel will always be numerical
and year 0 is Jan 0 1900
and each day is 1 so today's date is the serial number 39584 which means it
is that many days since Jan 0 1900.
so 02/2008 will default to Feb 1 2008.


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Regards,


Peo Sjoblom

 

[Pete_UK]

If you avoid using a character which Excel interprets as a date then
you will be able to type directly into the cell. Try it with an
underscore between the quarter and the year (02_2008), or you could
try it like this Q02/2008.

Hope this helps.

Pete

 

[Fred Smith]

If you preformat the cells as text, then you don't need to proceed the entry
with an apostrophe. Is that the simplification you are looking for?

Also, I agree with other posters that 02/2008 would mean to most people Feb
2008. First, why precede it with a zero? There are only 4 quarters in a
year. Additionally, something like 2Q2008 would be much more intuitively
recognizable to users.

Regards,
Fred.