Pasting html table to Excel reformats certain values

Hi!

When I paste an html table into Excel some cells are automatically
formatted to a different datatype.

My html table contains identifiers such as "6632/04" which I want to
store as text. Excel assumes that data like this is some sort of date
and displays "apr-32" instead when I paste the table. If I try to apply
the text format to the column, Excel converts the values to some type
of integer "1728420" which looks like it could be the integer value of
the date. It isn't possible to get the original value back!

How do I turn off Excels automatic formatting? The same behavior
appears in Excel 2003 and 2000.

Kind Regards,

Pete

If there are only a few cells in your table, you could format the cell as text
and the paste into formula bar.

If there are lots, maybe you could paste into a Notepad file, then save that
file as *.txt. Then use excel to open the .txt file. You'll see the text
import wizard and you can choose to import that field as text.



[email protected] wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> When I paste an html table into Excel some cells are automatically
> formatted to a different datatype.
>
> My html table contains identifiers such as "6632/04" which I want to
> store as text. Excel assumes that data like this is some sort of date
> and displays "apr-32" instead when I paste the table. If I try to apply
> the text format to the column, Excel converts the values to some type
> of integer "1728420" which looks like it could be the integer value of
> the date. It isn't possible to get the original value back!
>
> How do I turn off Excels automatic formatting? The same behavior
> appears in Excel 2003 and 2000.
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Pete

--

Dave Peterson