microsoft excel help please?

Question

when i type in 10-19 it automatically changes to october 19 how do i make it stop. 10-19 is supposed to mean ages

Answer 1

Put an apostrophe before 10-19. The apostrophe won't appear in the cell.

i.e., '10-19

If pretty must means it should be viewed as text.

Answer 2

Right click over the cell that contains 10-19 and click FORMAT cells, and in the NUMBER tab, choose TEXT .. this way whatever you enter, Excel will treat as text, not numbers.

Answer 3

Crap I used to have excel I'm gonna try to help you with this.

right click the field, or if it's multiple fields highlight the fields you want formatted. Then you want to right-click inside the original field or somewhere in the highlighted fields. When the menu comes up go to "format cells" You'll see a "number" tab...look down the list and you'll see "date" to the right of that little menu there will be different options on how you want your date formatted.

Answer 4

Type it in, or you can do this before typing by merely selecting the cells you want formatted this way...
Click on Format in the menu bar...Click on Cells and under the Numbers tab under categories choose either General or Numbers since your putting in a dash I'd choose General.

Answer 5

Click the column header to select the entire column (the A, B, C, whatever)

cl Format
cl Cells
cl the Number tab
cl Text

All numbers in this column will now be recognized as text instead of a date, dollar value ...

Answer 6

Yes, there may be other ways, perhaps even better, but one way is to put ' in front of everything that you type. The ' tells Excel to ignore any built-in formatting.

Answer 7

you need to format the cell to be either text which keeps whatever you type as is or else numbers where any numbers typed are kept as is. both work

Answer 8

Right click the cell format-date and then choose the style you want.