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Dash (-) in a cell

Hi,

When I enter a dash in my Excel spreadsheet, it seems to get interpreted as a minus with Excel trying to build a formula for me. I've tried using both General and Text format, and get the same result.

How can I get Excel to accept a dash (as a single character) literally?

Thanks

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

pollock_d

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SOLUTION

LoNeRaVeR9

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SOLUTION

Ashish Patel

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Mohammed Basheer

Select the Cell, right click, Format Cells. Change the Category from 'General' to Text.

mbizup

ASKER

Is there no "seamless" way to do this like an application-wide setting?

(I'm just picking your brains... I'm not a regular Excel user, but I'd guess if this is the only option, the end users who do use Excel regularly would be used to it and not complain :)

Basheerpt,

I did try formatting as text, and the dash was still interpreted as a minus sign.

Thanks

pollock_d

This is the way I have always done it, I am not sure if there is an option somewhere to treat all '-'s as text....

mbizup

ASKER

Thank you!

mbizup

ASKER

It actually makes sense since Excel is implicitly more calculation oriented than Access (which is what I'm used to).

Mike Eghtebas

Hi LoNeRaVeR9,

I am using one of your old solutions to accomplish a task. I you have time, please take a look at:

https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/23835982/Create-Chart-VBA.html

Thank you,

Mike