Excel is pre-programmed to make entering dates easier. For example, 12-2 will change to 2-Dec. This becomes inconvenient when you don't want the information you input to be changed into dates. Although you can't turn off this feature, you still have ways to deal with it.
The current solution is to format the date cells as text before entering numbers. This way, Excel won't try to convert numbers to dates.
Step 1: Select (highlight) the entire data range where you will enter numbers
Step 2: In the Home tab, click the down arrow in the Number Format section and choose Text format.
By doing so, you've removed the date format in Excel from the selected data range, and now you can enter numbers in the usual way without worrying about the format changing to dates.
If you only need to enter a few numbers, you can use a space or a single quotation mark (') before entering the number, for example, '22-2 or '15-6. It's advisable to use a single quotation mark instead of a space to input data because if you intend to use lookup functions for the data. Functions like MATCH or VLOOKUP will ignore the single quotation mark when calculating the result.
You can also input by adding the number 0 in front, for example, 0 2/3 or 0 3/4 because zero will no longer be in the cell after you press Enter and the cells become Fraction type.
In Excel, there are various date functions such as Date, Day, ToDay, Month, Year, which will help you perform your tasks and work quickly and efficiently.
Above is the guide on how to remove date format in Excel, hopefully through this guide, entering numbers in Excel will no longer be a problem for you. Moreover, Excel also has many other interesting and useful tricks such as creating incrementing dates. You just need to enter any date, Excel will automatically create for you a list of consecutive dates in increasing order, how to create incrementing dates in Excel? You can refer to the article that Mytour has shared.
Converting numbers to dates in Excel is also a procedure that many readers are interested in. With this method, you will know how to convert from a number to a date format. If you are interested in this issue, you can refer to the guide on how to convert numbers to dates available on Mytour. Wish you success.
