How can you stop date formatting of input in Excel 2007 ?

Hi,

I cannot stop the string 'mar1' from formatting as a date.

I tried formatting the cell as text. I tried prefixing it with a single ' .

I was actually trying to import a file from a CSV using the text import. I tried surrounding the field with double quotes.

I tried specifying 'text' as the format of the column in the text input dialog.

Any idea how to stop this? All I want to do is get some text to sort right and dates sort to the top of text. For example, anyone can try entering the following 3 lines:

aaa
bbb
mar1

Then sort it.

Thanks!
Dave

I don't know about your import method but with a web query there is an option to "disable date recognition". Try looking for that.

Looks like that option is only availabvle for web queries. Loading a simple CSV file using the "From text" does not have that option. I tried a web import using a FILE:// URL to my file and got a fatal error! I even tried an XML import to no avail.

At least I think I got my sort figured out. It insists on asking me the question about sorting numbers as numbers... If I take the straight text option instead of the default it seems to be OK.

It might actually be the sort function now that I think about it. You don't get that sort question prompt with a pure column. So it might be analyzing the column at sort time and guesses 'mar1' is a date and thus really a numeric field.

Thanks....