Excel changes some numbers or strings to dates to be “user-friendly” and ease the date entering process . However, Excel does so without actually asking you, and ironically, there is no option to turn this off. In this article, we’re going to show you how to stop Excel from changing numbers to dates.
One way to consider this is excel keeps changing my numbers into dates. Sometimes importing data into spreadsheets gives you headaches. While this issue is not directly related to Datawrapper, it’s a common and known issue with Excel – which can be frustrating and time-consuming: Excel is trained to “detect” formats, and sometimes the software tends to wrongly assume.
Why do excel dates look like numbers?
When you look at a date in Excel it’s actually a regular number that has been formatted to look like a date. If you change the cell format to ‘General’ you’ll see the underlying date serial number. The integer portion of the date serial number represents the day, and the decimal portion is the time.
Yet another inquiry we ran across in our research was “Why are my dates not showing up in my Excel spreadsheet?”.
Mainly this happens because Excel is considering these dates as text. However, Excel won’t apply number formatting in the text. Having doubt whether your date cell content is also counted as text then check out these signs to clear your doubt.
Why is it so hard to enter dates in Excel?
Microsoft Excel is preprogrammed to make it easier to enter dates. For example, 12/2 changes to 2-Dec. This is very frustrating when you enter something that you don’t want changed to a date.
Stop Excel from entering dates automatically by changing numbers to dates. You can format cells as text before you enter numbers. Or if you have just a few numbers to work with, enter a space before the number, or an apostrophe.
Is a date a number or a number in Excel?
In Excel, dates are numbers. Sometimes when you type a date, it becomes a number. You typed a number and it turned into a date. Select the range and use accounting, comma, or currency.
The dates in Excel are actually stored as numbers, and then formatted to display the date. The default date format for US dates is “m/d/yyyy” (1/27/2016). The dates are referred to as serial numbers in Excel. You will see this in some of the date functions like DAY (), MONTH (), YEAR (), etc. So then, what is a serial number?
How do I format a date as a number in Excel?
You can also take a cell that contains a date and format it as a number. For example, this post was published on 1/27/2016. Put that number in a cell (the keyboard shortcut to enter today’s date is Ctrl+;), and then format it as a number or General.