I have a large tab delimited file that I am opening in Word, it has two
date cells that are for dates, but they are in format YYYY-MM-DD
HH:MM:SS, and everytime I open it in Excel, it converts those fields to
dates, I need them to stay in their current format (text).

When I highlight the field and change it back to text, it converts all
the dates to a crazy number. I can't find the option anywhere to
turn-off "auto-date"...

I have even tried to create a new "book.xlt" and put it in the
App/MSO2004/Startup/Excel directory with all fields set as "Text"
instead of "General" and it works great as long as I start with a blank
SS, but if I go to "Open" my file, it still converts that darn date
field.

HELP!

If the file is a .txt file then when you do File | Open Excel will
automatically take you through the Text Import Wizard. Here you can
specify the delimiters, what line to start at etc, but you can also
tell Excel (on the 3rd panel) that you want some columns to be treated
as text. So, maybe if you renamed the file to .txt ...

Hope this helps.

Pete

In article .com,
wrote:

I have even tried to create a new "book.xlt" and put it in the
App/MSO2004/Startup/Excel directory with all fields set as "Text"
instead of "General" and it works great as long as I start with a blank
SS, but if I go to "Open" my file, it still converts that darn date
field.

If you open it using the Text import wizard (or choose Data/Get External
Data/Import Text file...), the third pane of the wizard's dialog allows
you to set any field to Text.