When I copy and paste to excel...

[wb]

How do I stop it from changing certain numbers into date format?

In this case, I'm copying a table from the RP which shows how many winners each trainer has at the track. If the trainer had 1/21 for example, excel is changing it to 21st January!

How do I make it stop doing this??

[vegyjones]

Try Paste Special and tick the format box??

[mathare]

How do I stop it from changing certain numbers into date format?

In this case, I'm copying a table from the RP which shows how many winners each trainer has at the track. If the trainer had 1/21 for example, excel is changing it to 21st January!

How do I make it stop doing this??

Not very easily.

Excel uses date serials meaning it counts all dates as a number of days from a certain point. That's how it 'sees' all dates internally. It can display them to you in a number of different formats but to Excel itself they are all the same - just a number.

Now 1/21 is treated as 21st January because of the dumb American date system. You could convert this to number format in the Excel cell but instead of getting 0.0476... you'll get a MUCH bigger number - one of those date serials I mentioned a minute ago. Annoying, as you've seen.

I desperately racking my brains to think of a way round this. If you do Paste Special you will get a choice of HTML, Text and Unicode Text if pasting from web browser. The last two options will give you the information exactly in the format it is displayed on the browser but if you are copying large amounts of information it will display each row in a single cell, i.e. it will ignore comma and tab delimiters.

A lot depends on how much data your c&p'ing...

[wb]

Thanks guys. I think I've figured it out...

If I open a new spreadsheet and highlight a large number of cells (where I'll be pasting to information), then click format and 'text'.

When I go and paste, it seems to display everything as it was.

[mathare]

If I open a new spreadsheet and highlight a large number of cells (where I'll be pasting to information), then click format and 'text'.

When I go and paste, it seems to display everything as it was.

I tried that with RP data and it didn't work for me. Glad to hear it seems to work for you though

[wb]

Glad to hear it seems to work for you though

You make me sound like I'm making it up!


I used unitext code when pasting. Sheet one is without the formatting, and sheet two is with it.

[mathare]

You make me sound like I'm making it up!

Sorry, didn't mean to. Just pleased you got it working, really.

[plater]

Wayne,

The way I get rid of this annoying irritation is to save any file as HTML ( put it into notepad and save as myfile.html), then in Excel use the import external data function, highlight the part you want using the arrow next to each table , then use the disable date recognition from the options tab, works for me .