Forum Discussion
How to get Excel to treat values as text with no functions or cell links?
HCStymie1 Are you by any chance using Excel for the Mac? In May 2020, a feature called Enable Click to Add was introduced and it behaves exactly as you describe. Start a formula and click on cells. Excel will automatically insert the clicked cell reference into you formula proceeded by a + sign. Extremely irritating. Switch it of under Excel, Preferences, Edit. It's poorly documented on-line and it doesn't seem to exist in the Windows version. Here is what I did find in the MS support pages. It's the feature at the bottom of the picture.
- You could try to manually set the format for the column ( that shouldn't calculate formulas / remove the commencing zero in numbers) to TEXT:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/format-numbers-as-text-583160db-936b-4e52-bdff-6f1863518ba4
Please keep in mind that numbers can't be in this format if you want to use them for calculations (e.g. substraction, summary, etc)Moriz_Kaufmann I did set the formatting to Text. Problem is things like equals signs and parentheses make Excel think you are trying to enter a formula or link to another cell if you click on another cell in the same or another Excel document. If I recall, I was able to put a single quote at the beginning of a line to tell Excel to treat the contents as text but forget if that also had limitations or not. Just didn't want those single quotes at the beginning of the text since I had to copy and paste everything back into the original program when done.
