I copied your example text from the original post to an Excel sheet with
column A formatted as text.

The 01-01 and 02-01 copied in as such.

Hang in. Maybe someone else can supply a suggestion.

Gord

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 14:37:07 -0800, Bob wrote:

Thanks for the reply. Pre-formatting does not fix the problem. "01-01" is
still pasted as "1-Jan" as an example...

"Gord Dibben" wrote:

Bob

Pre-format the cells in Excel to Text before the paste step.

Gord Dibben Excel MVP

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 12:33:02 -0800, Bob wrote:

I have a table (from Word for example) that I want to copy/paste into excel.

Example:
ID Description
01-01 Item 1
02-01 Item 2
16-01 Item 3
17-01 Item 4

The format of the cells for items 1&2 ID field will always default to a date
- Excel will show "1-Jan" instead of the "01-01" that was in the original
table. If I change the format of the cells to text after pasting I get the
serial number value for the date. I can't get back to the 01-01 without
manually reentering the data. The pasting of items 3 & 4 will work without
error. How can I keep the data as shown in my original table?