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How to disable Excel function triggered by a leading hyphen
I frequently need to place data into excel cells that have leading hyphen. An example would be copy and paste a list my animals - a dog - a cat from a word document into excel. Doing this howev...
- Thank you Peter and Riny,
I now appreciate that when a new sheet is created it has the NUMBER attribute GENERAL which caters for formulae and number entries.
From now on when I create a new sheet intended chiefly for text entry, I will select the whole sheet - click on top left bottom of the displayed sheet, then from the home ribbon in the Number group select TEXT. If subsequently within this sheet I have cells, column or row dealing with numbers, dates etc. then I with use the NUMBER group appropriately for these.
This fully satisfies my original question of how to disable the interpretation of the hyphen as a formula. The general Microsoft help line was unable to directly resolve the issue for me, however I give full marks to the Excel Technical Forum to which it referred me.
Could you please be more complete here in describing what you are doing and what happens.
IN particular, you say that copying and pasting that example list generates, in the third cell, a formula. That is strange indeed. But you don't say what the formula is. That would be helpful. But also:
- is it always the third cell, or every third cell (with a longer list)?
- what, in fact, is the whole task here? Why Excel--if it's words, not numbers--are you creating a database of some kind? Are there multiple columns?
- is the leading hyphen serving some purpose? Could it be eliminated?
Those are just questions I'd be asking if we were meeting in person. It could go on, but the main point is, you make it easier for us to help you if you can give a more thorough explanation of the big picture here.