Want to avoid pasted text becoming dates

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GeorgeB - 17 May 2005 13:48 GMT

Occasionally, I will paste from a table arrangement on a website.
Sometimes, this data will contain text that has some characteristics
of a date, eg, 3/16 as a fraction.

I could live with it becoming 0.1875, but not March 16, 2005. How can
I prevent Excel's intelligence from overcoming my stupidity <g>.

TIA, George

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Dave Peterson - 17 May 2005 14:08 GMT

One work-around is to paste into notepad.
Save that file as *.txt

Then open that text file in excel. You'll be prompted by the text import wizard
for how you want each field.

> Occasionally, I will paste from a table arrangement on a website.
> Sometimes, this data will contain text that has some characteristics
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
>
> TIA, George

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Dave Peterson

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GeorgeB - 18 May 2005 03:50 GMT

>One work-around is to paste into notepad.
>Save that file as *.txt
>
>Then open that text file in excel. You'll be prompted by the text import wizard
>for how you want each field.

That sounds good; I'll give it a try. The only problem will be in
figuring out the delimiters, but tab characters will probably be
insertrd, making it easy. Thanks!

>> Occasionally, I will paste from a table arrangement on a website.
>> Sometimes, this data will contain text that has some characteristics
>> of a date, eg, 3/16 as a fraction.
>>
>> I could live with it becoming 0.1875, but not March 16, 2005. How can
>> I prevent Excel's intelligence from overcoming my stupidity <g>.

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