The formatting is done towards the end of the Data/ Text to Columns process.
At step 3 of 3 in the Wizard, select the header of each column in turn and
set the format to Text. You need to do that *before* you hit the "Finish"
button of the Wizard.
--
David Biddulph

"ellen" wrote in message
...
Never mind. it didn't work. I highlighted the whole column, then did
format-cells-text. then I did text-to-column on that same data set
using a
space as the delimiter (I removed the '-'), and it converted the
destination
cell contents to 3-may. the origin cell remained mar06 (which is correct).
I
think the problem is that when the destination column is empty to begin
with,
it doesn't have anything to format, so it must be defaulting to number.
unfortunately, you can't let the data fill in (with the wrong format) and
then try to reformat. The cell actually has 05/03/2007 now.

"ellen" wrote:

Yes. But maybe you're asking because you can't highlight the whole
column?
do I have to highlight cells?

"Dave Peterson" wrote:

Did you specify Text in Step 3 of that dialog for each field?

ellen wrote:

MAR06 is March, 2006. Excel doesn't want to format the columns to
text. I
am using the format-cells-text option.

"Dave Peterson" wrote:

How about telling excel that both of the columns should be Text
when you're
going through that data|text to columns dialog.

(Don't use General)

If you want to change the strings to real dates later, you'll want
to post
back.

Is Mar06=March 1, 2006 or March 6, 2007?



ellen wrote:

i have data in a column that looks like this -
mar06-may07. i want to use
"text to column' and separate the two dates. i have formatted
both columns
as text so it won't 'interpret' Mar06 as 3-Mar or may07 as 7-may.
BUT it
won't stop formatting
the data as 6-Mar or 7-may.

--

Dave Peterson


--

Dave Peterson