Stop entirely Date conversion

[jakopak]

I have this recurring problem. When I paste some string in excel it automatically converts some string to date format and it will damage the the whole data structure.
The problem is present even after I paste to cells which have text format. I can't manually put ' before string for large tables. How do I stop this? Or better how do I switch off every automatic correction?

[mongoose36]

Have you tried Paste Special-->Values only? You do this by right clicking on where you want to paste the cells and selecting paste special and values only or in some versions of excel there is a shortcut icon (I believe it has 1,2,3) to do this. Doing a values only past will leave the formatting of the destination cells the same and not overwrite that formatting.

[newdoverman]

When you have copied the text and are ready to paste into Excel, click on the down arrow at the bottom of the Paste button. If you see Use Text Import Wizard, click on that.
When give the choice of Delimited or Fixed width, choose Fixed Width. Next, Next, Select TEXT, click finish. Numbers that look like dates will not be converted to dates by Excel.