How can I keep Excel from changing the format of a cell from "Text" to "Date?
" I use Excel 2002 SP3. I am entering a column of file names of the form
"01-01-01." Excel immediately presents that as "1/1/2001" So I then change
the format of the cell to "Text" and it changes the cell entry to "36892",
the day equivalent. So, I format the cell as text before typing in the entry,
and, as I would hope, it gives me "01-01-01" Now the frustration begins.
The file names have a repeating pattern, so I want to be able to copy a block
and do a "Find and Replace" on one part of it - for example to change "01-01-
01" "01-01-02" etc to "01-02-01" "01-02-02" etc. I copy the block of values
into a block of cells pre-fomatted as dates, and they present correctly.
When I do the Replace, however, Excel automatically changes the format of the
cells whose values I'm replacing to date, so instead of "01-02-01" I get
"1/2/2001" Is there a way to turn off this excruiatingly annoying "smart"
feature or do I have to type in all my text values preceded with a single
quote? Seems like I was doing that with the first version of Supercalc, but
I hoped we had progressed since then.
John