Excel treats 1/2 as a date instead of a fraction
 

On Monday, January 17, 2000 at 3:00:00 AM UTC-5, Robert Pearson wrote:

I had a similar issue with tracking a number of completed steps in a project (24 total steps in this case); here is what worked for me:

I created a table, into which I could paste my data as values only. Some fractions, such as 6/24 came out as a date (June 24), while others, such as 24/24 came as text. These two each needed to be calculated separately.

I created a new column on the right (titled "count") with a function referencing the fraction. Since any date will be greater than 1, I used =IF([@Current]1,TEXT([@Current],"MM/DD"),[@Current]) - where @Current is the column with the offending dates/fractions.

This will only generate text, so to get it into a number format, I created another column with the function =LEFT(@count,2)/RIGHT(@count,2). They you'll have a number you can format as a decimal, fraction, percentage, etc.

This was the simplest way that I could figure that wouldn't require running macros or pasting through notepad.