I think what Mike missed was to pre-format the cells as Text BEFORE your paste.

That usually works.


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP


On Sat, 29 Sep 2007 18:38:00 -0700, jwt wrote:

Thanks but this doesn't work. When I make the format text teh entries that
Excel thought were dates gets formatted as teh numerical value.

"Mike" wrote:

Format the cells as Text.
You can do this by doing a right click on a cell or an entire column. Then
choose fomat cells. In the Category choose Text

Should work

"jwt" wrote:

I'm pasting data into an Excel spreadsheet which is formatted as W-L-T, i.e.
1-0-2. Excel very handily insists that I'm trying to paste in a date, even
though most of the values clearly aren't valid dates (which values Excel
leaves alone). Other than writing a formula to figure out where Excel has
outsmarted itself, is there a way to turn this "feature" off?