Turning off Date Conversion in Excel

[Ken Hutchinson]

I wonder if anyone can help me with this. Some of our company par
numbers are being interpreted by MS Excel as dates (ex: 2404-08-1
becomes August 12, 2404). When I work in Excel, I manage to avoid thi
by formatting the cells which will contain these numbers as "tex
only." It works about 90% of the time, though for some reason th
formatting does not stay permanent and I have to re-enter the data
This isn't too big a problem for if I'm careful about formatting th
cells before I start entering data.

However, my boss is not very computer literate and he is confounde
every time this happens. He cuts and pastes the data into ne
spreadsheets which aren't formatted properly and loses all of hi
information because the part number he entered in has now bee
converted to a serial date value, and it is almost impossible t
convert this back to the original part number he was using.

Does anyone know how to turn this off in preferences or something?
need a way to prevent Excel form doing this, and I need it to be don
in a way that my boss can't screw up because he's cutting and pastin
data into new spreadsheets

 

[britwiz]

I wonder if anyone can help me with this. Some of our company part
numbers are being interpreted by MS Excel as dates (ex: 2404-08-12
becomes August 12, 2404). When I work in Excel, I manage to avoid this
by formatting the cells which will contain these numbers as "text
only." It works about 90% of the time, though for some reason the
formatting does not stay permanent and I have to re-enter the data.
This isn't too big a problem for if I'm careful about formatting the
cells before I start entering data.

However, my boss is not very computer literate and he is confounded
every time this happens. He cuts and pastes the data into new
spreadsheets which aren't formatted properly and loses all of his
information because the part number he entered in has now been
converted to a serial date value, and it is almost impossible to
convert this back to the original part number he was using.

Does anyone know how to turn this off in preferences or something? I
need a way to prevent Excel form doing this, and I need it to be done
in a way that my boss can't screw up because he's cutting and pasting
data into new spreadsheets.

Hi Ken

Presumably firing your boss is not an option?

You could try preceding your parts numbers with an apostrophe (e.g.
'2404-08-12) to let Excel know that it's dealing with text.

Regards

Steve

 

[Tammy Coxen]

Hi Ken

Presumably firing your boss is not an option?

You could try preceding your parts numbers with an apostrophe (e.g.
'2404-08-12) to let Excel know that it's dealing with text.

That works if you're entering data by hand, but it doesn't work when you're
trying to cut and paste large amounts of text. Any other suggestions?

Tammy

 

[Ken Hutchinson]

Steve wrote:
Presumably firing your boss is not an option?

You could try preceding your parts numbers with an apostrophe (e.g.
'2404-08-12) to let Excel know that it's dealing with text.

Thanks for the suggestion, Steve. I've actually considered somethine
like this, but honestly I don't think he's going to accept any solution
that requires an effort on his part. He's one of the people who has
little patience or understanding of technology. He just expects it to
work, no matter how many times it's his fault. Needless to say, this
makes my job difficult since I'm the one he calls into his office to
fix something he screwed up every time he works in Excel. You can only
imagine what happens when he tries to do a date sort.

 

[Scoops]

Thanks for the suggestion, Steve. I've actually considered somethine
like this, but honestly I don't think he's going to accept any solution
that requires an effort on his part. He's one of the people who has
little patience or understanding of technology. He just expects it to
work, no matter how many times it's his fault. Needless to say, this
makes my job difficult since I'm the one he calls into his office to
fix something he screwed up every time he works in Excel. You can only
imagine what happens when he tries to do a date sort.

Hi Ken

Hmm, I think you may be stuck with this. Excel is trying to be helpful
and in your case it really is a pain. I don't know of a global setting
that you can change so, even if you're setting the cells to text, the
next time he opens a new sheet the same "problem" will be presented.

The only real solution I can think of is to change the parts numbers to
something not resembling dates (e.g replace the hyphen with a comma or
add leading zeros - 02404-008-012). How realistic a solution that is
I'll leave to you.

Regards

Steve