How can I defeat Excel's auto-reformating into date format?
 

Seems simple enough - I want a cell to contain the value 5-0. I've tried
pre-formatting the cell to text before copying, I've tried formatting after
pasting - nothing works. As soon as I enter 5-0 Excel converts it to a date.
There is no "paste special" feature that works.

If this were one cell it might be simple enough, but I want to copy a large
table of which this is just one column of several with many rows.

Any ideas?
Thanks,
Steve

Hi
try pre-formating the cells as 'Text' and use Paste Special - Values

--
Regards
Frank Kabel
Frankfurt, Germany

"stebro" schrieb im Newsbeitrag
...
Seems simple enough - I want a cell to contain the value 5-0. I've
tried
pre-formatting the cell to text before copying, I've tried formatting
after
pasting - nothing works. As soon as I enter 5-0 Excel converts it to
a date.
There is no "paste special" feature that works.

If this were one cell it might be simple enough, but I want to copy a
large
table of which this is just one column of several with many rows.

Any ideas?
Thanks,
Steve

Thank you Frank for your reply, however this doesn't work. The source for my
data is a website, and the "paste special" options I have are html, unicode
text, or text. "Values" is not available for this paste. And as I
mentioned, pre-formatting doesn't help; as soon as Excel sees the 5-0 it
changes the format to a date.


Thanks,
Steve



"Frank Kabel" wrote:

Hi
try pre-formating the cells as 'Text' and use Paste Special - Values

--
Regards
Frank Kabel
Frankfurt, Germany

"stebro" schrieb im Newsbeitrag
...
Seems simple enough - I want a cell to contain the value 5-0. I've
tried
pre-formatting the cell to text before copying, I've tried formatting
after
pasting - nothing works. As soon as I enter 5-0 Excel converts it to
a date.
There is no "paste special" feature that works.

If this were one cell it might be simple enough, but I want to copy a
large
table of which this is just one column of several with many rows.

Any ideas?
Thanks,
Steve