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Alan Mailer Alan Mailer is offline
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Default Stop Formatting text as DATES???

I'm trying to automate sending values from an SQL Server database to
an Excel sheet. I don't want Excel to 'translate' these values at
all. I want them to be placed into Excel Cells *exactly as they are
written in the database*.

Here's the situation: This database happens to have a column of
values which read like this, for example:

1-55
1-56

.... In the database in question, these values have nothing to do with
Date values. Nevertheless, Excel is receiving the above text and
automatically treating them as if they *are* date values. For
example, the cells above end up displaying in their Excel cells as

Jan-55
Jan-56

If you click on a cell, you can see in that upper 'bar' area (the
Excel textbox area just to the right of the 'fx' label) that my values
are appearing as:

1/1/1955
1/1/1956

....even though all I programatically entered into the cells were the
'1-55' and '1-56' text values from my database.

How do I STOP Excel from 'interpreting' my incoming values so that the
incoming values are placed *literally* into Excel cells?

Thanks in advance for any/all feedback.