Find and Replace causing a "Text" cell to become a custom date--wh

B

Benjamino5

Hi,

I'm not too familiar with Excel, so maybe I'm missing something obvious. I
have a cell (dozens, actually) that are formatted as Text. Each one contains:

Page: 5-6

--or similar. I need to do a Find & Replace to get rid of "Page: ". When I
do that, the cells switch to dates (the one above would be "6-May") and they
are formatted as Custom, with a date setting.

Why is this happening? How can I stop it?

Thanks a lot!
Ben
 
N

Niek Otten

<Why is this happening?>
Sometimes Excel is just too "helpful"

<How can I stop it?>
Replace "Page: " with a single quote. It will not show in the cell but will cause the result to be treated as text

--
Kind regards,

Niek Otten
Microsoft MVP - Excel

| Hi,
|
| I'm not too familiar with Excel, so maybe I'm missing something obvious. I
| have a cell (dozens, actually) that are formatted as Text. Each one contains:
|
| Page: 5-6
|
| --or similar. I need to do a Find & Replace to get rid of "Page: ". When I
| do that, the cells switch to dates (the one above would be "6-May") and they
| are formatted as Custom, with a date setting.
|
| Why is this happening? How can I stop it?
|
| Thanks a lot!
| Ben
 
B

Benjamino5

Niek,

That worked--thanks! Do you have any links to more information about this?
I'm not sure why your trick worked, and I'd like to learn Excel.

Ben
 
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