Getting Excel to not try to coerce numbers to Date
 

I have a problem that plagues me persistently:

Whenever I enter what i consider ranges in a single cell ("1 - 30"),
Excel will interpret that as Jan-30. I do not want this behavior. I
wish Excel to format things as date ONLY if i Explicitly tell it that
the value is a date (if, for example, i format the cell as Date format
or enter something like "4/30/2004").

Is there anyway that I toggle off this behavior? Any help would be most
appreciated.

Getting Excel to not try to coerce numbers to Date
 

Format the cell as text before you make the entry.

or

preceded the value with a single quote

'1-30

--
Regards,
Tom Ogilvy

"R Avery" wrote in message
...
I have a problem that plagues me persistently:

Whenever I enter what i consider ranges in a single cell ("1 - 30"),
Excel will interpret that as Jan-30. I do not want this behavior. I
wish Excel to format things as date ONLY if i Explicitly tell it that
the value is a date (if, for example, i format the cell as Date format
or enter something like "4/30/2004").

Is there anyway that I toggle off this behavior? Any help would be most
appreciated.

Getting Excel to not try to coerce numbers to Date
 

-----Original Message-----
I have a problem that plagues me persistently:

Whenever I enter what i consider ranges in a single cell
("1 - 30"),
Excel will interpret that as Jan-30. I do not want this
behavior. I
wish Excel to format things as date ONLY if i Explicitly
tell it that
the value is a date (if, for example, i format the cell
as Date format
or enter something like "4/30/2004").

Is there anyway that I toggle off this behavior? Any
help would be most
appreciated.
.

you might want to make sure that you have that cell
formatted as "general".

Getting Excel to not try to coerce numbers to Date
 

that would ensure the Excel does what it is doing now.

--
Regards,
Tom Ogilvy

wrote in message
...

-----Original Message-----
I have a problem that plagues me persistently:

Whenever I enter what i consider ranges in a single cell
("1 - 30"),
Excel will interpret that as Jan-30. I do not want this
behavior. I
wish Excel to format things as date ONLY if i Explicitly
tell it that
the value is a date (if, for example, i format the cell
as Date format
or enter something like "4/30/2004").

Is there anyway that I toggle off this behavior? Any
help would be most
appreciated.
.

you might want to make sure that you have that cell
formatted as "general".

Getting Excel to not try to coerce numbers to Date
 

These are two suggestions that I follow (by necessity) all the time.
The reason why I would like this is because I often open up a text file
from Excel and many of the "1 - 30" or "2 - 5" are in random cells and i
do not wish to format everything as text.

Are you saying that there is no way to force Excel not to coerce these
strings to Dates?


Tom Ogilvy wrote:
Format the cell as text before you make the entry.

or

preceded the value with a single quote

'1-30

Getting Excel to not try to coerce numbers to Date
 

That is what I am saying.

if opening a text file, the import wizard allows you to specify a column as
Text, so you could specify all your columns as text.

--
Regards,
Tom Ogilvy

"R Avery" wrote in message
...
These are two suggestions that I follow (by necessity) all the time.
The reason why I would like this is because I often open up a text file
from Excel and many of the "1 - 30" or "2 - 5" are in random cells and i
do not wish to format everything as text.

Are you saying that there is no way to force Excel not to coerce these
strings to Dates?


Tom Ogilvy wrote:
Format the cell as text before you make the entry.

or

preceded the value with a single quote

'1-30