Annoying automatic date-formatting on import... how to remove it?

"Jose McNach" <josenet@tiscali.co.uk> wrote in message
news:1149186439.217009.183940@f6g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> I'm using Excel to import tab-delimited text files containing a large
> number of rows and columns. The data are mostly numerical, but some are
> text.
>
> Somehow, Excel insists in renaming certain values as if they were
> dates. For instance I have a column with gene names, some of which with
> names like "SEP10" or "DEC7"... and Excel sees that as a date and turns
> it into "10-Sep"... In other cases renames entries such as "3-24" as
> "24-Mar"...
>
> How can I turn off EVERY automatic "intelligent" feature in Excel so
> that it just takes what I feed it? I have gone through every menu
> turning off automatic formatting and everything I could see... but that
> behaviour remains.
>
> I'm sure there must be a way to import these data so that numbers are
> treated like numbers, and everything else as text... but I can't find
> how, and I am finding it very frustrating.

When you open the text file, the wizard should give you the opportunity to
select the format for each column.
--
David Biddulph

David Biddulph wrote:
> "Jose McNach" <josenet@tiscali.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:1149186439.217009.183940@f6g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> > I'm using Excel to import tab-delimited text files containing a large
> > number of rows and columns. The data are mostly numerical, but some are
> > text.
> >
> > Somehow, Excel insists in renaming certain values as if they were
> > dates. For instance I have a column with gene names, some of which with
> > names like "SEP10" or "DEC7"... and Excel sees that as a date and turns
> > it into "10-Sep"... In other cases renames entries such as "3-24" as
> > "24-Mar"...
> >
> > How can I turn off EVERY automatic "intelligent" feature in Excel so
> > that it just takes what I feed it? I have gone through every menu
> > turning off automatic formatting and everything I could see... but that
> > behaviour remains.
> >
> > I'm sure there must be a way to import these data so that numbers are
> > treated like numbers, and everything else as text... but I can't find
> > how, and I am finding it very frustrating.
>
> When you open the text file, the wizard should give you the opportunity to
> select the format for each column.
> --
> David Biddulph

That's if I open it from Excel, and if the extension name hasn't been
set to open with Excel (a nice little shortcut, adding different
extension names depending on what kind of data I have...). So, yes,
there are ways to get around the issue... but none very satisfactory.
I'm all for having the possibility for software guessing and helping
our formats etc... but there should always be an option to NOT do
anything but take the data as it is.

Thanks for your reply, David.

Jose