Allow us to turn off automatic conversion to date
Search for "make excel stop converting numbers to dates" and you will see the user demand for this feature. Please for the love of all that is holy let this be at least an advanced user setting.
Jessica
shared this idea
Thanks for the suggestion Jessica. We’ve got a few other suggestions on the site that are similar with scientific notation, etc. We’ll take a look at this area, and pay special attention to any cases that get a lot of votes. So please keep the votes coming to help us do a good job at prioritizing asks like this!
Cheers,
John [MS XL]
54 comments
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Matt
commented
Please. My data hurts so bad.
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i just don't give a zak
commented
@noLongerAnon: the problem was, being anonymous means you didn't vote. that was all.
@Roy: i've never been good at accepting training, especially of the Pavlovian style. i'm already using Gdocs whenever i run into this issue. it's just hard for those situations where no internet is available.
@Mr. Dent: see Roy's comments.
yes i realize i'm playing both sides of the fence. it's how to survive in a world where companies don't care about our needs. -
not Anonymous
commented
@anonyzak no clue why that display name was in my profile. However, I changed it just for you. Good now?
And... you see my tweet (and my RL name), so where is the problem?Keep on fighting for this never ending bug, no matter what your synonym is.
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Roy
commented
They ARE paying attention to this forum: note the new text appearance in the comment creation box. (Not text handling, just the font is different.)
Of course, it could just be an unexpected jacking by a silent software upgrade doing a "no by your leave" major change via a minor little thing to them, you know, I hear SOME renegade, thoughtless software companies do that...
Unfortunately, updating this yet NOT updating even their comments on the subject/s, suggests a LOT of neglect on the "producing" end of the concept. "Oh, we'll collect a lot of input, so you don't go anywhere, but you know, we won't really do anything with it... you understand don't you?"
The stunning result in Pavlov's work was the part where, once an animal was conditioned, how many thousands of times the stimulus would elicit the reaction even though no reward was EVER again provided. The rest of his work was interesting, sure, but that part was sttunning.
Ding-ding, ding-a-ling, Master made a little comment 3½ years ago, don't go switching to Google...
So, sadly, yes, other forms of pressure are likely needed and some might be more effective. I don't use social media myself, but most-a-y'all surely do, and those avenues might be helpful, if only to educate people about this forum and the idea of voting.
Consider the 800,000,000 (estimated) users of Excel and the 280 (nope, not even one comma in that) people actually voting here... I'm sure MS looks at this as more of a suggestion source than any kind of urgent need, "gotta act and act now!" before the press gets wind of this, kind of forum.
Even the Python suggestion with 5,000 votes and a survey conducted getting over 10,000 responses, all acknowledged in the Admin comment, only merits a "so we'll certainly think of this now and then" encouragement.
I, for one, must encourage other avenues, even if they seem to be off-focus, because SOMETHING more is clearly needed.
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Arthur Dent
commented
@anonyzak I'm certain that Microsoft is checking their **very public** social media responses. However, it's not clear that they're checking this forum, as the this issue has been open since 2015, and it's straightforward to fix. They just need an option to turn off (or to permanently turn off) whatever poorly-written algorithm incessantly performs the automatic date conversion.
Google Sheets is already good about solving this problem.
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i just don't give a zak
commented
@Anonymous: why don't you stop being anonymous and vote HERE where we have a forum that Microsoft checks, instead of trying to have us retweet something?
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not Anonymous
commented
Comment, retweet and like:
https://twitter.com/PatrickSeidl/status/1121615201206276096?s=19 -
Anonymous
commented
Suggested almost 5 years ago and it's still a problem. No wonder companies are moving away from Microsoft. Its obvious they don't give a flying rats a$$ about fixing issues. Support sucks the big one.
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Anonymous
commented
At this point is clear Microsoft doesn't give a **** about fixing excel. Only making the toolbars different. I recommend LibreOffice. It might have the same problem but there's an open source community that will work to make it better. And if not its open source so you can always fix it yourself. **** excel and **** this 5 year old post that microsoft ignores cluttering my inbox.
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Anonymous
commented
Please fix it. Please ASAP
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i just don't give a zak
commented
agreed. auto-ANYTHING is annoying, because it never reads my mind.
indeed, what kind of super-genius uses "seconds since 1970" as a way to type dates in?
if this was kept, there should at least be an "OFF" button for it. -
Anonymous
commented
Do you guys actually read these complaints?
I'm so sick and tired of my sku numbers changing to dates! People have been complaining about this for YEARS. Please listen -
Anonymous
commented
A student's email ID begins with APR so when I import the CSV file with him in it, suddenly his email ID becomes a date. Who in the world thought this was a good idea?
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Roger
commented
I use excel to analyze large chunks of data. The raw data is usually in the form of a csv file and I am not always aware that some fields may contain data that will be changed to a date and changing the format after the import is not usually helpful as it has already been converted. Some way to turn this off, especially if you open or import a csv file would be ideal. It is the single biggest issue when dealing with data comparisons in Excel. Thank you
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Anonymous
commented
Stop pretending you care, John/Microsoft. This has been a problem for decades and you've refused to fix it.
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Alex
commented
you'd think when bugs were identified the fix would be implemented immediately rather than for them to be dismissed as a feature request
When an implementation leads to data corruption then it's a bug not a feature
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Clay Dreslough
commented
Although this thread is only 3 years old, it's actually been MORE THAN 15 YEARS since I originally reported this Microsoft. :(
(And I wasn't the only one complaining about it at the time).
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Anonymous
commented
Why hasn't this been fixed? I can't find a way to stop it converting ratios (e.g. 2 / 5) to dates. I've tried converting the column to text ahead of time. This makes excel unusable for what I want to do. It's been 3 years. What are you doing? It would be so simple to just allow us to turn it off, so many people are complaining about it. What is going on?
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Anonymous
commented
WHY HAS THIS NOT BEEN FIXED? IT HAS BEEN THREE YEARS
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Anonymous
commented
I never thought it's a harmful feature, it's a ******* bug, all right?