Weird autoformat

[Jonathan]

We were just upgraded at work to Office 2002. I did not have this
problem with earlier versions. I often enter text such as "A02-12" or
"A01-03" into spreadsheets (this stands for Annealer 2, run 12 or
Annealer 1, Run 3). However, now when I type it, for some reason
Excel interprets that as a date with a very strange custom format.
For example, A01-03, comes out look like a bunch of arabic with the
number 3 after it. The format is B2d-mmm . If I change it to
general format its the number 37686, which is the date March 6, 2003.
Typing something like "B01-03" comes out as that text. If I put a
single pop (') in front of A01-03 when I type, it comes out like the
text I want. I believe the problem is Excel is interpreting the A as
meaning I want things in the Hijri date format (I found something
about this in help). But how do I turn that feature off?

 

[Tom Moore [MSFT]]

Hi Jonathan,

I believe that the behavior you refer to is documented in the following
Microsoft Knowledge Base article:

812385 XL2002: Cells Automatically Format with Hijri Date Format When You
Type
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=812385

While this behavior is described as by design in Excel 2002, note that the
article provides a Registry entry to disable the Hijri conversion. Another
method might be to pre-format the column or range where such values might be
entered in the future, as Text (Format > Cells >Number tab > Text). However,
if you have a mixture of numeric and data such as "A10-03" (without quotes)
the article Registry key will likely be the better option.

Hope this helps!