Unwanted excel conversion text to dates

[Maureen O'Gorman]

I am copying an HTML table from a web page into excel when a series of
internal phone extension is being translated into dates ( 5-4357
becomes May 4357 for example).

I have tried to format the cells as text prior to the copy, I have
tried to use the paste special feature but it is unavailable because
of I am cutting and pasting from another app.

I turned off calculations on the sheet hoping that the paste operation
would not screw-up the data but that didn't work either.


Any suggestions how I can do this without having to resort to some
other application to clean up the data first ?

 

[Dave Peterson]

If you're only doing one cell at a time????

You can format the cell as text and paste into the formula bar.

(But that's one cell at a time.)

I don't have a good way for multiple cells.