Turn off Auto-Converting entries

[Charlie]

Hi,

We are creating Excel reports for electrical equipment rated power (Amps),
e.g.

Equip Equip
Rated Full
Power Load
------- ------
25 HP 60 A
30 HP 100 A
5 HP 10:00 AM

As you can see, Excel automatically converted "10 A" to 10:00 AM, assuming
the input was a time abbreviation. Without me going through all of our
report templates and forcing the cell formats to "Text", is there an
application setting to tell Excel not to auto-convert my input values?

TIA,
Charlie

 

[Pranav Vaidya]

Hi Charlie,

I tried to look for disabling this however not much luck, but there is a way
around this. If you enter 10 A as '10 A, Excel will not change it.

I will keep looking for the solution and let you know ASA I get one.

HTH,

 

[Charlie]

Unfortunately I can't use the tick mark ['10 A] because another vendor's
application is what populates the sheet. We can only change the sheet layout
and choose the fields from the database that get extracted into the report.

For now I'm changing all the columns that get populated with Amperage values
to "Text". But what a pain! We have a bunch of different reports. Whenever
MS developers come up with a new "Feature" they need to include an option
switch to turn it off! (Like the Ctrl-A "Feature" I discovered not too long
ago.)

 

[Bill Renaud]

Use a format that Excel does not recognize as a time:
10 Amps

<<Unfortunately I can't use the tick mark ['10 A] because another vendor's
application is what populates the sheet.>>

How do you get the data from the vendor? If they are putting it in an Excel
workbook, then you might have to write a macro to change the data after you
open the file. If it is written to a text file, then maybe you could write
a macro to import it and specify "Text" for the format of that column in
the OpenText method.