How do you disable date recognition in VBA?

[pfrattali]

I'm using a macro to do a simple copy and paste of a website page (whole page in Internet Explorer). I call up IE and navigate using the VBA macro. Part of the data shows expressions like '1 / 2' or ''2 / 3' which is saying 'one out of two' and 'two out of three', etc.

The problem is when they are pasted on a worksheet, excel converts them to dates such as '1-Feb' or '2-Mar' . Don't want this.

I tried to pre-format the cells to text before running the macro, but it didn't work. It gave me a 5 digit date # ?


How do I disable the date recognition using a macro to copy from a website?

I am not using 'web query' by the way, and I know how to disable the date recognition by this method.

I'm using the following code basically:

' grab the whole screen & paste into Excel
ie.ExecWB OLECMDID_SELECTALL, OLECMDEXECOPT_DONTPROMPTUSER
ie.ExecWB OLECMDID_COPY, OLECMDEXECOPT_DODEFAULT


  'Wait for page to load!
  Do
 
    If ie.ReadyState = 4 Then
       ie.Visible = False
       Exit Do
    Else
       DoEvents
    End If

  Loop


ie.Quit


ActiveSheet.Paste

thanks for your help.

[pfrattali]

never mind. Found the solution.

After copying the web page, the following code will take care of the problem. The figures will show correctly

ActiveSheet.PasteSpecial Format:="html", Link:=False, DisplayAsIcon:= _
        False, NoHTMLFormatting:=True

BEFORE this, you need to format the cells in question as 'Text'.