Excel wiill not treat the entry 11-11-11 as a text entry. It keeps treating it like a date.

[hankone]

I wish to add the entry 11-11-11 as a title for a movie.   I then wish to be able to enter this in Excel without it being changed to a date or treated as a number.  And then be able to sort this without Excel telling me that it is a number or a date and will be sorted differently.  How can I do this?

I am using Office 2016.  Windows 10.

[#2]

@hankone 

Either format the cell as Text before entering the value, or prefix the value with an apostrophe.

When you enter '11-11-11, the apostrophe tells Excel to treat the value as text. The apostrophe will be displayed in the formula bar, but not in the cell itself.

[#3]

The reply solves half my problem. But the entries have the little green triangle in the upper left corner.

When I try to sort the data containing 11-11-11, I get the Sort warning that I have some numbers stored as text. Since I do not have any numbers stored as text (11-11-11 is not a number), I do not need this warning and shouldn't get it.

If I put 0 11-11-11 in the cell, Excel recognizes this as not a number and lets me sort it without the Sort warning.

How to I get Excel to recognize that 11-11-11 is not a number when I do a Sort containing this in the cell?

[#4]

@hankone 

I find those green error triangles irritating. I have turned them off by clearing all the check boxes in the Error Checking section of File > Options > Formulas.

A date is a number in Excel, and Excel recognizes 11-11-11 as a possible date, hence the warning.

[#5 · Accepted solution]

I have found an answer to my specific problem.

I place 11-11-11 in a cell
I format the cell as a Number then Custom then as Type 11-11-11.
This permits 11-11-11 to be shown without the green triangle and more importantly allows the column this cell is in to be sorted without generating a Sort error.