Formatting cells for decimals and hyphens

[Kram]

Greetings,

I'm trying to make a spreadsheet of available guns at our store and I need
to type in things like:

..410
..300
..308
..243
30-06

but it self corrects .410 to .41 and if I write 10-11-11 it wants to create
a date.

How do I turn off the formatting so I can type in decimals and hyphens
without excel correcting them to some other format?

Thanks, Mark

 

[Dave Peterson]

Preformat that range (whole column?) as text.
(Format|cells|number tab|Text)

Or start your data entry with an apostrophe:

'.410
'30-06

 

[Ron Coderre]

Try this:
Select all of the cells you might be entering data into, or just select the
whole column...then

Format>Cells>Number
Category: Text
Click [OK]

Now, everything you type into those cells will be text and not
re-interpretted by Excel as number.

Does that help?

***********
Regards,
Ron

 

[Ron Rosenfeld]

Greetings,

I'm trying to make a spreadsheet of available guns at our store and I need
to type in things like:

.410
.300
.308
.243
30-06

but it self corrects .410 to .41 and if I write 10-11-11 it wants to create
a date.

How do I turn off the formatting so I can type in decimals and hyphens
without excel correcting them to some other format?

Thanks, Mark

Either pre-format the data entry range as text (format/cells/number/text)

OR precede the entries with a single quote. This will not show up in the
printout.


--ron

 

[Kram]

Wow, that is a quick response...one game of solitaire and 3 quick answers,
I printed out all three.

Thanks very much for the help!

Mark