Forum Discussion
Worst Feature of All Time! -Date Auto Correct-
Hi Matthew,
It seems that there is no option to turn off this feature!
By the way, there is an https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-desktop-application/suggestions/10108722-allow-us-to-turn-off-automatic-conversion-to-date in the Excel's suggestion box asking for this, you can vote for it as I did.
For now, you can preset the format of empty cells to Text so that anything you typed will stay as it is.
To do that, select the cells, press Ctrl+1, choose Text from the Category list and then hit OK.
Regards
Haytham AmairahFunny thing about text formatting...It doesn't work correctly! If you are importing a text dataset with more than 998 columns. All cell formatting will be ignored for columns 999+.
You can preformat the entire sheet to text, doesn't help.
You can select all columns in the import wizard and set them to text, the preview mode doesn't seem to see anything beyond 998 columns.
If you try to reformat the cells to "text" afterwards, it converts the fields to a number i.e. 1/1 -> 43466. If you try to (Ctrl + H) replace all 43466 with 1/1 or '1/1, specifying "text" cell format in the replace all options, it forcibly converts the 1/1 back to 1-Jan with a "custom" cell format.
Date correction is a special level of hell from which there is no escape beyond manually typing "'1/1" with an apostrophe 19,787 times.