I have a series of spreadsheets filled by farmers that list the composition of NPK fertiliser applied to their fields. In some of these something happened with the cell format (that was originally set to text) and now the fertiliser composition is read by Excel as a date.
Example of text entered in the cell (N:P:K): 25:00:14
Excel now reads this as: 01/01/1900 01:00:14
When looking at the cell, I see the correct value (25:00:14). However, when importing the data into Python, or when copying the value to a different cell, the date (01/01/1900 01:00:14) gets exported instead.
I have tried: changing the cell type to text, copying the contents of the cell into another cell set as text, replacing ':' with a different special character. Nothing along these lines seems to work.
I have a few hundreds of these entries, so any ideas on how to avoid having to re-enter them manually would be greatly appreciated!
