How do I stop cells formatting?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Interesting Ian
  • Start date Start date
I

Interesting Ian

Hi,

I have some zip files of spreadsheets that I downloaded off the net
displaying various odds for betting markets (betfair historical data).
However for some of the cells which contain correct scores for football a
date has been substituted e.g. 1 - 3 gets automatically converted to 1st
March (or something). I normally get round this problem by formatting the
relevant cells as text before entering the correct score, but I can't do
this since they have already been converted on unzipping.

If I format as text afterwards I just get mysterious 5 figure numbers.

Any suggestion as to what I can do? I can't do it one by one manually
because they might be 10s of thousands of correct scores which have been
converted into a date.
 
Hi Ian

Before importing the data into Excel, after you unzip the files, ensure that
they either have no file extension, or that the extension is .txt

Then when you try to import them into Excel, the Data-Text to Columns Wizard
will get invoked.
Stepping through the Wizard, you will then have the opportunity of selecting
the column containing the scores and choosing Text as the format for
importing.

--
Regards
Roger Govier

Interesting Ian said:
Hi,

I have some zip files of spreadsheets that I downloaded off the net
displaying various odds for betting markets (betfair historical data).
However for some of the cells which contain correct scores for football a
date has been substituted e.g. 1 - 3 gets automatically converted to 1st
March (or something). I normally get round this problem by formatting
the relevant cells as text before entering the correct score, but I can't
do this since they have already been converted on unzipping.

If I format as text afterwards I just get mysterious 5 figure numbers.

Any suggestion as to what I can do? I can't do it one by one manually
because they might be 10s of thousands of correct scores which have been
converted into a date.



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