text numbers as dates via OCR import

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
G

Guest

Here is a tough one... I have OCR scanned a printout from a database that
contains sales information. The key column of data is the Product number
which is in the format of nn-nn-nnnn. Of course upon import into Excel, it
treats some (but oddly enough not all) of these entries as dates in the
format mm/dd/yyyy. I had formated the sheet as Text prior to import. There
seems to be no way now to properly sort this data as I get the "mixed numbers
and text" box during a sort operation and of course it sorts in that order.
I have tried several formulas, macros and formatting steps to try to turn the
"dates" into text. It even returns "False" to the Isnumber() formula! Yet
keeps finding "numbers" and if I change the cell format to DATE, it returns a
date e.g. 01/22/7701 (item number 01-22-7701) HELP!
 
Can you save your scanned text as a .txt file.

Then you could open that file in excel, and when the Text to columns wizard
appears, you could specify how each field should be treated--this one would be
text.
 
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