Excell anoyance

[Red Squirrel]

How do I stop excell from wanting to format cells differently when dealing with dates/time? I find this really anoying. It either wants to change it, or puts a green error triangle because it does not like my format. I just want to treat it as text, that's it.

I tried to set the cell format as text but it still does it anyway. This problem has been present in all versions that I've dealt with. Now I'm using 2003.

 

[MrChad]

Type an apostrophe character (') before your date string. This applies to numbers as well. Excel will treat it as text.

 

[Billb2]

Or a null character (Alt-255)

 

[Red Squirrel]

Hmm good to know, thanks. null char will probably work nice as it wont be visible.

 

[Rhonda the Sly]

The apostrophe shouldn't be visible, it won't add a space before your string either.