Worst Feature of All Time! -Date Auto Correct-

[Matthew Leonard]

Hello everyone I apologize beforehand if I start to sound a little angry. I simply want to express my point of view and see if anyone shares the same thoughts or not.

The auto correct date function is the most irritating function in all of excel! I simply want to type the characters 6-8 that has nothing to do with the date whatsoever yet it corrects it to the date every time. I have tried to enter the way I want several different ways, but there is no physical way to have exactly what I want typed in the cell because it corrects it no matter how it is put in. Furthermore, I sometimes use excel for my training logs and I like to list the date of each day as 5/2 and nothing more, but it continues to correct it. I think this correction should never be default, and should only occur if I choose to correct it that way. I don't see why it should ever get corrected in the first place. If I want the full date it takes less than half a second to type the extra 2-4 characters. The feature does NOT save time, in fact, it does the opposite. The correction wastes everyone's time by forcing us to go back and fix it every single time it happens and use undesired characters even when unrelated to date. Users should have the ability to type the date exactly as they want it. 

If anyone can tell me how to turn off the date correction completely it would be very appreciated.

Let me know if anyone else finds this feature annoying.

[#2]

Hi Matthew,

It seems that there is no option to turn off this feature!

By the way, there is an idea 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

[#3]

@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.

[#4]

@Matthew Leonard 

So? I love the fact that you commented on this person's issue but can anyone suggest a solution? The issue described goes far beyond what is described. It is a truly foolish and crippling feature that, by all definitions, is a bug. I do hope that Microsoft staff read these posts occasionally and will actually do something about it. when you do not KNOW what a users wants, you MUST not make assumptions for them, ask them if they want it sure but what was the rationale behind it? do they assume Excel programmers are too stupid to be able to format a cell or column to a date? If a user or developer wants to use a date in a formula, it is likely they understand how to use a textual date in that formula. just leave things as they are entered if you are listening and care. A number entered into a field is extremely unlikely to be intended to be a date, humans don't think that way, just leave things alone. Please.

[#5]

As of today, March 2023, I find this Excel feature is the most stupid thing MS ever creates. This feature is giving me too many frustration such that I want to throw my laptop into the wall. A simple task of copying 1,000 rows with text format "dd/mm/yyyy" turns into nightmare. A date "02/03/2023" is converted to Feb 3, 2023 on paste while correctly it should be Mar 2, 2023. How stupid is it when I just want to leave the format as it is. WE DONT WANT YOUR HELP ON AUTO CONVERSION. Why do you make it a default and now tell us, you cannot do anything. A creator of something cannot do anything to their own creation? So funny.