Why do apostrophe's dissapear when I paste into InDesign

[harrisva]

I have several Excel spreadsheets with columns of dates. They are
formatted with an apostrophe and then the two digit year. ex: '00.
When I paste the document into InDesign the apostrophes dissapear. I've
tried changing the font to Times Roman with no luck. I am using
Microsoft Excel X for Mac Service Release 1.
Any help is appreciated.

 

[CyberTaz]

There are several contributing factors here so I won't go into them all, but
the main one is that XL treats the apostrophe as a text indicator rather
than as a literal character. It probably isn't even getting copied. You can
find several ways to work around the problem if you're familiar with Custom
Formats.

One idea - if the dates are entered as 10/23/2006 or 10/23/06 apply a Custom
Format such as the following:

"'"yy

That will force either of the 2 example dates above to display as '06 in the
cell. Since the ' is being inserted as a literal character it will carry
over to ID if you copy/paste or Place (preferable method, BTW).

Otherwise it depends on how the dates are entered, whether you need them
stored as date values in XL, etc.