Text, Number and Date formats excel 2003 driving experienced user

[E F Bat]

I have been using excel for several years and recently upgraded to 2003.
I have word documents containing tables of text in the form 45/23/03, when
copied & pasted into excel, any that appear to be a date get converted to
dates and appear as a date code. How can I stop this?
I have columns of data eg 01020003, A203034, 2255003, which I enter as text,
format as text and then may wish to sort/copy or use as the souce or table
index in vlookup etc. whenever I copy or edit these excel 'automatically'
converts the numbers to numeric etc, drops leading zeroes and so forth, so
that they no longer sort properly and don't work in lookup etc. Is there any
way to stop this automatinc reformatting of my data as it is seriously
unproductive.
Conversely, I have working formulae in cells and when I perform a minor edit
they then display as text (this stopped hapenning after I switched off the
'allow editing in cell' option, although I was editing in the formula bar out
of habit anyway).

[Bernard Liengme]

Try formatting the target cells as text before copying
--
Bernard V Liengme
www.stfx.ca/people/bliengme
remove caps from email

"E F Bat" <E F Bat@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:C131F919-B925-4939-9607-D8DB47E58DAF@microsoft.com...
>I have been using excel for several years and recently upgraded to 2003.
> I have word documents containing tables of text in the form 45/23/03, when
> copied & pasted into excel, any that appear to be a date get converted to
> dates and appear as a date code. How can I stop this?
> I have columns of data eg 01020003, A203034, 2255003, which I enter as
> text,
> format as text and then may wish to sort/copy or use as the souce or table
> index in vlookup etc. whenever I copy or edit these excel 'automatically'
> converts the numbers to numeric etc, drops leading zeroes and so forth, so
> that they no longer sort properly and don't work in lookup etc. Is there
> any
> way to stop this automatinc reformatting of my data as it is seriously
> unproductive.
> Conversely, I have working formulae in cells and when I perform a minor
> edit
> they then display as text (this stopped hapenning after I switched off the
> 'allow editing in cell' option, although I was editing in the formula bar
> out
> of habit anyway).