Format help

[Dan Wilson]

Good day. I am running Excel out of Office365 (updated) and Windows 10 Home (updated). I have workbooks that track my music library. One of the Columns in these workbooks holds the song titles. Some of those titles have numbers as the title. For example - "1-2-3". The format for the Column has been set to "General" or "Text". The end result is that the "1-2-3" entered in the Cell becomes either a date or numerical sequence of the date. After that happens, I look at the format for the particular Cell and it has been changed to "Date". The only way it works is to add a space character between the numbers and the dashes. What am I doing wrong or not doing right? Any help will be appreciated.
Thank you,
Dan Wilson...

 

[Skyybot]

And you're formatting BEFORE entering the data?

 

[KillerOfGiants]

My understanding is that when a cell is formatted to General, it will then attempt to interpret new data entered into it how it believes it will happen (so 1-2-3 would be January 2, 2003). If you format the cell to TEXT, then it will only read as text.
That gets cumbersome for me, so if I have a column with "mixed" data such as you have, when entering something that could be interpreted as a different type of value, you can type the apostrophe before the data, so if you type: '1-2-3, it will display as 1-2-3.

 

[Alex Blakenburg]

I would probably disagree with that. A title is never going to be used for doing calculations. Format the whole column as Text. Anything manually entered will be treated as text.
The only watch out is that if you are copying in data from another cell in Excel make sure to copy Values or you will bring in the original cells formatting.
If you are copying it from another application for a single cell copy it into the formula bar not the cell, or for multiple cells hit Ctrl+Alt+V and select text when you copy it in.

 

[KillerOfGiants]

If he's already got a lot of data that may be an issue cuz changing the format afterwards without "re-entering" the data doesn't affect the format it is currently in.

 

[Alex Blakenburg]

The data needs to be cleansed regardless of the method. A text to columns will handle the numbers. Hopefully date conversions were forced in as text when they were entered.

 

[Dan Wilson]

Good day Skyybot, KillerOfGiants and Alex Blankenburg. Thank you for the help. It likes the answer is to empty the particular Cell, format the entire Row to General and then enter the song title.

 

[Alex Blakenburg]

I wouldn't recommend that. It won't solve the problem going forward.
The Title column should always be text regardless of whether you enter a number or not.
Formatting the column as Text is the safest approach eventhough its not foolproof since a copy paste that includes formatting will overwrite the formatting applied.