Seems such a simple thing...

How can I start text in a cell with a hyphen without Excel thinking it is a
minus sign.

Thanks


--
Confusion will be my epitaph...

On 19 Sep, 09:40, Appalachia
wrote:
Seems such a simple thing...

How can I start text in a cell with a hyphen without Excel thinking it is a
minus sign.

Thanks

--
Confusion will be my epitaph...

Place a ' in front of your text
For exampleL -

enter 0001, and you get 1
enter '0001 and you get 0001.

Hope that answers your question.

Mark

Thanks

That did it.

Now - where is that in Excel help?


--
Confusion will be my epitaph...


" wrote:

On 19 Sep, 09:40, Appalachia
wrote:
Seems such a simple thing...

How can I start text in a cell with a hyphen without Excel thinking it is a
minus sign.

Thanks

--
Confusion will be my epitaph...

Place a ' in front of your text
For exampleL -

enter 0001, and you get 1
enter '0001 and you get 0001.

Hope that answers your question.

Mark

Now - where is that in Excel help? [entering text after apostrophe]

With HELP it has always been a good idea to once you find an answer to
look it up in HELP so you can see where it is. Even that doesn't seem to
work anymore. Since searching "help" gets worse and worse with each
version of Excel you might think to search online which is where Microsoft
puts help in Excel 2007, whether that means on the web or not is debatable. I believe
before Excel 2002 you would probably find the single quote listed before
the alphabet along with such symbols as @ # $ % for formatting and
errors.

Google Search:
excel text entry site:microsoft.com single-quote OR apostrophe

So did find
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214233
which is a Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article not help. So that
should be a start search on the phrase -- revise search
excel site:microsoft.com "Precede the entry with an apostrophe"
guess what, only one entry and you already know what that was.
--
HTH,
David McRitchie, Microsoft MVP -- Excel
My Excel Pages: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/excel.htm


"Appalachia" wrote in message ...
Thanks

That did it.

Now - where is that in Excel help?


--
Confusion will be my epitaph...


" wrote:

On 19 Sep, 09:40, Appalachia
wrote:
Seems such a simple thing...

How can I start text in a cell with a hyphen without Excel thinking it is a
minus sign.

Thanks

--
Confusion will be my epitaph...

Place a ' in front of your text
For exampleL -

enter 0001, and you get 1
enter '0001 and you get 0001.

Hope that answers your question.

Mark