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Posted to microsoft.public.excel.misc
Jim Rech
 
Posts: n/a
Default How do I remove the annoying automatic date formatting in Excel?

The feature cannot be turned off. Your best bets are using Text format, as
you mentioned, or preceding the entry with an apostrophe.

--
Jim
"Jose-Edinburgh" wrote in message
...
|I use Excel to display/sort tables of data arranged in columns.
|
| Some of ther columns are numeric, some are text.
|
| One of the columns is giving me a lot of hassle. It should contain names
of
| genes, which Excel does okay, until you find names like "SEP7" or "MAR3",
| which Excel transforms into a date form, usually "Sep-07", but sometimes
into
| a 5-digit number like "39326".
|
| I have cancelled every auto-correct and auto-format option I can think of,
| but no joy.
|
| The only thing that works is format the whole thing as text.
|
| Isn't there a way to avoid this "by default", so that Excel just shuts up
| and takes what I type in as I type it, without changing anything? If it's
a
| number, it's a number, if not, it's text...
|
| It's very annoying, because I have these tables with tens of thousands of
| names, which I rearrange, merge, mix... when you import a column of names
the
| names are changed without warning. I don't want Excel to guess anything
for
| me.
|
| If you know how to turn off this "feature" that appears loaded by default,
| please let me know.
|
| Thanks!
|
| Jose