How to stop auto formatting number to date in Excel?
In Excel, when you type a string number like “2014-6-1” or “1/2” into a cell, it will auto format this number to date “6/1/2014” or “2-Jan”. Sometimes, you may think this auto formatting is annoying, now I tell you how to stop auto formatting number to date in Excel.
Stop auto formatting number by adding a space or apostrophe
Stop auto formatting number by formatting as Text
Convert text date/number string to standard date
Stop auto formatting number by adding a space or apostrophe
If you only have a few numbers to enter, you can stop Excel from changing them into dates by entering a space or apostrophe.
Before you enter the number data, type a space or apostrophe ‘ into the cell then following the number data, press Enter. If you type the space before data, the space will be retained after press Enter button, if you type the apostrophe, the cell format will be converted to text format, and the apostrophe will disappear when you press Enter. See screenshots:
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Stop auto formatting number by format as Text
If you have a long list of number data need to be typed into cells and stop auto formatting to date, you can use the Format Cells function in Excel.
1. Select the range you want to type the data number and right click to open the context menu and click Format Cells. See screenshot:
2. Click Number tab and select Text from the Category list. Then click OK to close the dialog. See screenshot:
Now you can type the number data into the range and it cannot be auto formatted as date. See screenshot:
Note: The above two methods cannot work when the number data has been typed already.
Convert text date/number string to standard date
When you copy date from other sources to Excel, the date maybe change to text format, or for convinient, you may type date as number string directly, such as 20160504. In thses case, you may want to convert thses nonstandard dates to the standard date formatting mm/dd/yyyy. Here with Kutools for Excel--a handy tool, its Convert to Date utility can quickly convert multiple non standard dates to standard dates.
| Kutools for Excel, with more than 300 handy functions, makes your jobs more easier. |
After free installing Kutools for Excel, please do as below:
1. Select the nonstandard dates, and click Kutools > Content > Convert to Date. See screenshot:
2. After applying the Convert to Date, you can see all the nonstandard dates have been converted to the standared dates in the Convert to Date dialog, and just click OK to exist the dialog.
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