Turn off Excel auto formatting

holmsey

Does anyone know how to turn off the auto formatting in excel?

im using a web query that gets the names and odds of horses running at a certain racetrack from the paddy power website and puts them on a spreadsheet. But if a horse has odds of 8/1 for example, excel automatically changes this to 8-Jan (as it auto formats it to a date) which is of no use to me. i need it to be stored as text so i can retrieve it from a java program that im using.

sceptre

This should be a simple one - either highlight the relevant column by clicking the letter at the top of the sheet or highlight the whole sheet by clicking the blank box at the top left (above 1 and left of A). Then click Format, Cells and select Text. You're done.

Here's the kicker though - it'll do funny things to any existing data you have in the sheet (given that 14-1 is currently regarded as 14-Jan it'll change that value to the number of days since 1-1-1900 or something). You could export the bare data and reimport it after if this would cause you major issues for your existing data.

Mercury_Tilt

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