Turning off "intelligent" date-formatting... how?

[Jose McNach]

I'm using Excel to import tab-delimited text files containing a large
number of rows and columns. The data are mostly numerical, but some are
text.

Somehow, Excel insists in renaming certain values as if they were
dates. For instance I have a column with gene names, some of which with
names like "SEP10" or "DEC7"... and Excel sees that as a date and turns
it into "10-Sep"... In other cases renames entries such as "3-24" as
"24-Mar"...

How can I turn off EVERY automatic "intelligent" feature in Excel so
that it just takes what I feed it? I have gone through every menu
turning off automatic formatting and everything I could see... but that
behaviour remains.

I'm sure there must be a way to import these data so that numbers are
treated like numbers, and everything else as text... but I can't find
how, and I am finding it very frustrating.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Jose

 

[Nick Hodge]

Jose

There is no way to turn it off. You are able, if using the text import
wizard to mark the column(s) as text. I'm afraid I only have the O2007 Beta
installed currently, but I think it's the third step.

If you can't do this you can really only prefix the data with a single
apostrophe, It will not show but Excel will treat it as text

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
www.nickhodge.co.uk
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Jose McNach]

Hi Nick,

many thanks for your reply. But, really? no way to turn it off???
pretty amazing.
I tend to open the txt files by right-clicking and selecting "open with
Excel", so I don't see the wizard.
I can get around this issue... but it seems like a huge oversight from
Microsoft to not allow to turn off such behaviour.
Yet another niggle to add to the list ;-)

thanks!

Jose