Forum Discussion
How to disable Excel function triggered by a leading hyphen
- 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.
"Apparently Microsoft is aware of the problem it has imposed on its users of text and is not ready to budge from insisting that they get around it by using an apostrophe.
Has consideration been given to being able to classify sheets or cells as non-formula?"
Probably not. What is a problem to you is a 'feature' that is used day in day out by other Excel users, and Microsoft is unlikely to break backward compatibility to address this issue. Riny_van_Eekelen 's suggestion of formatting cells as text is the solution, the catch being when someone tries to add a formula (starting with "=") to your workbook it will just sit there looking at them as dumb text.
Excel is a calculation tool and, as such, is desperate to convert anything that could be a number or formula into one (excuse my personification of Excel).
PeterBartholomew1 Yeah sorry I'm a daily Excel user/Accountant/numbers/formulas guy and have never seen any benefit to this "feature" whatsoever... but maybe I'm completely missing something.