Microsoft Office Excel 2007... (Vista), converts numbers to dates and I don't want it to do that!?

Question

I'm cutting and pasting a column of football records 12-0, 11-1, 10-2, etc into Microsoft Office Excel to do some calculations on those numbers. Essentially I want to convert them to a precice winning percentage. When I cut and paste them in (there's a lot of them) Excel converts them into dates ... callender dates. How do I get it to not do that?

Answer 1

Copy the data, then in excel, before you past the data, try this: go to edit and past special, then select text and hit okay.


If that does not work, highlight what you pasted in excel, right click on it, got to format Cells, Click on the number tab at the top, hit general or number or text and hit okay.

Answer 2

Vippers was correct. In 2007, you cannot format after you place the data in the cell to a number (you receive a reference number instead).

Highlight a column, go to FORMAT CELLS, change to Text, then paste your data into the cell. But it will be TEXT, not number. And that would require another formula.


I would suggest placing the winning in one column (A) and the loses in another column(B). That way if you're looking for percentage on say 12-6 (50%), you can just divide the two cells. IF you place 12-6 in one cell, you cannot obtain a percentage without entering an addtional formula.

Answer 3

Apparently the cell(s) that you are pasting to are formatted to convert the input to a date format. To correct an entire column or row, right click on the row number or the column alpha letter, go to format and change the entire row or column to text. You can do the same thing for individual cells by right clicking on the individual cell and change the format value

Answer 4

It wroks on both Xp and Vista. But it needs some minimum system requirements. But it surely works in Windows Vista.

Answer 5

You need to format the cell (ie the boxes) or just do the whole row, there is a button on top that will allow you to do this under format.