Nick

http://www.tabonline.com.au/cgi-bin/main.pl?
Now the cat is out of the bag everyone will start a spreadsheet to beat the
racing system, lol.
--
Vince


"Nick Hodge" wrote:

Vince

Where are you pasting the data from?

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
www.nickhodge.co.uk
HIS


"Vince" wrote in message
...
Hi Martin

Thank you for your reply.

In making my request to Microsoft, I gave details of why the change was
necessary. Unfortunately Microsoft did not provide any background
details
to my request so here they a-

I am copying and pasting about eight fields of data at a time. Two of
the
eight fields take the form of either a blank or two, three or four numbers
separated by - e.g. 3-4 or 10-7-20 or 15-1-24-2. The blank and the last
form are no problem but Excel changes the one dash and two dash forms to
dates. I can't include an apostrophe because I can't change the data
that I
am copying.

I have searched Excel in vain for everything automatic in the hope of
turning this feature off. I have tried every type of preformat and
paste.
I have read just about every post on this discussion group and it has
taken
many hours. There are other posters with similar problems. Heather
can't
change her input data. Caen(?) is copying and pasting like me. A reply
to
his post says this Excel feature can't be turned off.

One post suggests setting up of a text file to be read into Excel
including
a dash, - , as a delimiter. I have set up a text file using Notepad and
read it into Excel including - as a delimiter. This works but because
there
are 0 to 3 dashes in a text record entry, there are 1 to 4 columns in the
corresponding Excel record. This is a random effect and the resulting
Excel
spreadsheet is a mess of overlapping columns.

The answer is quite simple. Excel should accept any sequence of
characters
as typed or pasted unless requested to do otherwise. It is very simple
for
a user to change 1-2-3 to a date but it is impossible to change that date
to
1-2-3. All of the Excel features are intended to be helpful but it
should
be possible to turn them on or turn them off.

I have tried everything that I can think of. If anyone has more ideas, I
will try them. Meanwhile I think this is a programming problem in Excel
and
needs a programming solution.

Kind regards

Vince

P.S. This is my fourth attempt to post. I keep getting error messages
and lose posts that take ages to write. After the first failed attempt,
I
started in writing in Word so that I can keep copying and attempting to
post
until successful. I find this discussion group system very difficult to
use
compared to other discussion groups.

--
Vince


"MartinW" wrote:

Hi Vince,

Just precede your input with an apostrophe '
i.e. '1-2-3

The apostrophe forces your input to text format.
You can also preformat the cell(s) as text.

HTH
Martin