Stop auto correction of number into a date When i work with excel, i do data ent

Question

Stop auto correction of number into a date

When i work with excel, i do data entry, some of the numbers that i type in can be interpenetrated as dates. when this happens excel automatically changes the format of the cell from general, to date. i want to be able to stop this auto correction.

I know there are a number of ways to avoid this happening, but i am fed up with these methods. i simply what to turn the auto correct off, so that instead of what i type into the cell changing, what i type into the cell shows exactly what i typed in.

really hope there is someone out the who knows how to do this.

thanks

Explanation / Answer

I understand your frustration but this is not an autocorrect issue.

Typing in 1/5 will automatically be recognised as a date as that is what it is unless... you signify that it is a formula and you expect the answer 0.2 to appear or it is a text item in which case you must preceed the data with a ' apostrophy.

In signifying the that the item is text you will have a data item which is left aligned, as all text is by default. All other items in this column (even if purely numeric such as product codes) should aligned left. Product codes though numeric should never be treaded like numbers, if you do, then expect issues. Telephone numbers are similarly not true numbers, if they were treated as such, leading zeros would be dropped.

Though the whole idea of having to type in that extra character of ' is a pain to remember, it will make your data more acurate, reliable and portable.

If you format the cells as Text, all entries will be entered as text
(leading zeroes will be retain, date-like values won't be converted to dates, etc)
...CTRL+1 (to view the formatting dialog window)
...Select: Number_tab...Category: Text

That should resolve most (but not all) of the problem.

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