

Or, change fractions into decimals, e.g.Or, add a zero and space before number formats such as 1/2 to avoid the change to date format.The apostrophe will not be displayed after pressing Enter. Or, add an apostrophe (') BEFORE you enter the number, e.g.Press Enter to make sure that this space remains in the cell. They are quite easy to spot in the columns. If your dataset has only a few lines, you can manually check whether datapoints where wrongly changed into dates.
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Special formatting tricks to avoid having Excel change numbers into datesĮxcel documentation has some additional tips on how to avoid that automatic change of numbers: Click on the column, then choose the correct format in the drop-down menu that pops up on the left side: If that guess is wrong, you can easily change the format again. As soon as you upload the numbers to Datawrapper, it guesses what data format your columns have. Choosing the correct format in DatawrapperĮven if Excel now thinks that your numbers are text, our data visualization tool Datawrapper will be able to recognize them. Please note that you can't perform calculations such as SUM with the pasted text. Here's a 30 second video showing the whole process: Select them, click on the warning sign ⚠️ and select "Ignore Error." You'll see little green triangles in the top left of your pasted cells.To do so, go to the Home tab, then click on the little arrow next to "Paste" and select "Match Destination Formatting." (To achieve the same result, you can also go to Edit > Paste Special., and then select "Text" before clicking "Ok.") Now make sure that your data is pasted as text.You can also press Cmd+1 to select "Text" there and then click "Ok." Select the columns or cells you want to paste into and choose "Text" in the format dropdown of the Home tab.The trick is to choose the format of the column before you enter or paste the data: So, how can you show a column with values like 12/2 without having them converted into dates? How to get around this in Excel If you then ask Excel to change the format to "Text," it shows you a weird high number like 44239. Then, from the Editing section, choose Fill > Series. If you enter 12/2, it will change to 2-Dec or 12. While your cells are highlighted, in Excel’s ribbon at the top, click the Home tab.
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While this issue is not directly related to Datawrapper, it's a common problem with Excel that can be frustrating and time-consuming: Excel is trained to "detect" formats, and sometimes the software wrongly assumes that a certain number represents a date. Sometimes importing data into spreadsheets can be a headache. Excel keeps changing my numbers into dates.
