Prevent excel changing numbers data to dates.

Help, im going crazy trying to paste data from a web page into excel and keep
the original format but every time I paset something that could be a date (eg
4/4) it changes the cell to a date (eg 4-April)

How do I stop it doing this?

I have tried changing the format of the cell to be text or numbers only but
that does not work, I have tried pasting the data into a notepad (converting
it into plain text) first, then into excel with limited success.

Place a single quote (apostrophe) before the data you want to leave un-changed.
--
Gary's Student


"Cindax" wrote:

> Help, im going crazy trying to paste data from a web page into excel and keep
> the original format but every time I paset something that could be a date (eg
> 4/4) it changes the cell to a date (eg 4-April)
>
> How do I stop it doing this?
>
> I have tried changing the format of the cell to be text or numbers only but
> that does not work, I have tried pasting the data into a notepad (converting
> it into plain text) first, then into excel with limited success.

"Cindax" <Cindax@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:B39C343C-8626-42EE-ABD5-397F8AC5BEF8@microsoft.com...
> Help, im going crazy trying to paste data from a web page into excel and
> keep
> the original format but every time I paset something that could be a date
> (eg
> 4/4) it changes the cell to a date (eg 4-April)
>
> How do I stop it doing this?
>
> I have tried changing the format of the cell to be text or numbers only
> but
> that does not work, I have tried pasting the data into a notepad
> (converting
> it into plain text) first, then into excel with limited success.

Having set the format to text or numbers, have you tried Paste Special,
rather than just Paste?
--
David Biddulph