option to prevent Excel changing 1-2-3 to a date

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Urhixidur

There are now at least 7 users who have posted this problem.

See "Using Hyphens in a cell"
 
Vince said:
Urhixidur

There are now at least 7 users who have posted this problem.

See "Using Hyphens in a cell"
Click to expand...

That I would never have found, as hyphens do not appear in the clipboard
contents that trigger the problem (except for occasional substrings like "ID-
time").

I've since found that closing Excel and launching it again clears the
problem, but I'm still pissed at the behaviour changing without any prompt
and without any apparent means of control on my part.
 
Vince said:
There are now at least 7 users who have posted this problem.

See "Using Hyphens in a cell"
Click to expand...

Nope, the posts all concern Excel auto-formatting, whereas the intermittent
bug/feature I've run into is Excel auto-parsing (i.e. the Data: Convert
menu). A very different problem.
 
I completely agree with the suggestion.

In my case, I have a block of data to paste (scraped from a table on the
internet), two columns of which are win-loss records (11-3, 10-4, etc.). Not
only are they displayed as dates, but the cell contents are converted to date
code so there is no hope of changing them back.
 
Instead of copying and pasting the web data, use Data>Import External
Data>New Web Query.

In that dialog you have, under "Options", the function to "Disable Date
Recognition"

Or copy and paste into Notepad and save as *.txt file.

Open that in Excel and the Text Import Wizard will pop up allowing you to
designate the format of the data.


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP
 
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