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if I type "MAR3011" into a cell in Excel, Excel unhelpfully transforms this into 01/03/3011. I have tried turning off auto-correct (can't be done) and auto-complete (makes no difference), and it is no surprise that these fail as neither really describes what Excel is doing, it's some sort of guess-my-shorthand-and-auto-transform-it non-feature and I'd really like to be rid of it forever as I paste long lists of module codes into Excel and may not notice that it has corrupted them with its own ideas about what I mean. I know I can prefix the code with a prime mark but why should I have to?

DJDave
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You can format the cells as Text rather than general which would stops the conversion (only works if you do it before the entry). I don't know a way to make Excel default to Text for all cells, but you could try something like in this post. There are consequences though of course if you want to use numbers. I'm not aware of any way to specifically override one type of conversion although someone clever about office programming could probably write an addin.

Community
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Uriah Blatherwick
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  • works nicely - thank you (I think it's scandalous that Excel changes my data - classic MS presumption, "we know what you want better than you do") – DJDave Mar 21 '12 at 11:17
  • Glad it worked! You could also put a prefix in front like XMAR3011 that would probably do it too. The line between trying to be helpful and making a mess of things is often more blurry than it should be. – Uriah Blatherwick Mar 21 '12 at 16:07