Excel changes text to date format

[Neomatrix]

Cells are formatted as text for each month of 2020 like this 01/2020 02/2020 03/2020 ..... until 12/2020. After selecting all 12 cells and replacing 2020 with 2021, using Ctrl+H to replace all at once, excel automatically turns into date format (01.jan)

 

[etaf]

Replace seems to change the format - happens on my 365 version of excel
format column as text

enter various dates - and all left justified as text
then i used replace
and they all reverted to right justify and real dates

 

[venkatmail]

use the concatenate formulae with ' after applying the formulae to replace them with 2021. so that it will be still text.

 

[Neomatrix]

Replace seems to change the format - happens on my 365 version of excel
format column as text

enter various dates - and all left justified as text
then i used replace
and they all reverted to right justify and real dates

I can't format columns since I have numbers below, anyway, I have tried your solution and still the same problem appears

 

[Neomatrix]

use the concatenate formulae with ' after applying the formulae to replace them with 2021. so that it will be still text.

Yes, without ' it can't recognize as text. Thanks