Prevent excel changing numbers data to dates.

[Guest]

Help, im going crazy trying to paste data from a web page into excel and keep
the original format but every time I paset something that could be a date (eg
4/4) it changes the cell to a date (eg 4-April)

How do I stop it doing this?

I have tried changing the format of the cell to be text or numbers only but
that does not work, I have tried pasting the data into a notepad (converting
it into plain text) first, then into excel with limited success.

 

[Guest]

Place a single quote (apostrophe) before the data you want to leave un-changed.

 

[David Biddulph]

Help, im going crazy trying to paste data from a web page into excel and
keep
the original format but every time I paset something that could be a date
(eg
4/4) it changes the cell to a date (eg 4-April)

How do I stop it doing this?

I have tried changing the format of the cell to be text or numbers only
but
that does not work, I have tried pasting the data into a notepad
(converting
it into plain text) first, then into excel with limited success.

Having set the format to text or numbers, have you tried Paste Special,
rather than just Paste?