Alan
I had a similar problem:
If I entered 1-55 I got Jan-55 which when I changed the format to TEXT (from
General) I got 20090. If I formatted a cell to text prior to entering the
data, I got 1-55.

I have just tried a custom format of D-YY and that reverts from Jan-55 to
1-55! So perhaps give this a try.

HTH

"Alan Mailer" wrote:

Thank you to everyone who has responded so far, but neither formatting
cells as 'General' or 'Text' seem to be giving me what I want.

Using '1-55' as an example of the literal text I want to appear in the
cell. both a 'General' format and a 'Text' format cause this to appear
in the cell:

20090

I'm sorry I didn't mention this in my first message but, for what it's
worth, I'm using Excel 2002.

I'd be open to any more ideas, and thanks again for the ones already
provided.



On Tue, 24 May 2005 03:42:14 -0700, "Toppers"
wrote:

Format cell as text. General (on my testing) translates your data to Date as
you have found.

"Alan Mailer" wrote:

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.