Certain numbers always become dates

[Cornelius]

No doubt this question has been asked, but I can't find it
with a search.

Whenever we enter numbers of various formats (5-digit, xxx-
xx-xx, other types) excel wants to turn them into dates.
This is no good, because this data is of course not a date
but something else. Is there a way to disable this
feature of Excel? This seems to happen sometimes even if
I pre-format the cells to number or text.

Thanks,
ccc

 

[Frank Kabel]

Hi
either format the cell as 'Text' or precede your entry with an
apostrophe: '12-23-33

 

[Cornelius]

Hi again Frank. A pleasure to hear from you again, your
prior advice has saved me many hours.

I have used these, as well as the "=" sign. Is there no
way to disable the automatic formating? This is a
perpetual problem in our office where we use a lot of five-
digit serial numbers as well as two-hyphen numbers. If it
can't be disabled, so be it, but the number of entries we
have of these types is fairly large.

 

[Frank Kabel]

Hi
excep formating these cell as 'Text' no way to disable this

 

[Cornelius]

Most unfortunate. Hopefully MS will update this at some
point. Thanks.

 

[JBoulton]

I'm not sure what kind of data you're working with, but while 12-5-4
automatically converts to Dec. 5, 2004, =12-5-4 evaluates to 3.

 

[hgrove]

Cornelius wrote...

Most unfortunate.
True.

Hopefully MS will update this at some point. Thanks.

Don't hold your breath. This is unlikely to change until Microsof
rewrites Excel's formula parser, and I'd bet that won't happen unti
StarOffice reaches a 25% market share