Excel converts fractions to dates on paste

DROam

New Member
Joined
Oct 6, 2015
Messages
1
This is driving me absolutely crazy. Whenever I paste a table of data to Excel, it automatically converts fractions to dates. First of all, this is ludicrous, and shouldn't be done automatically. Secondly, I can't find a way to stop it.

I read several forums which said to change the number format to "fraction" or "text" or "number" before pasting. But I did this, and whenever I paste my data, Excel decides to change all of the cells that I pasted into to "General" format, except for the ones with fractions which it converts to "Custom" format and again changes the fractions to dates!

Someone please tell me how I can circumvent this ridiculous "functionality" and paste fractions as fractions. If I want to convert them to dates, I can do that myself. I hate for my first post on this forum to be a rant, but this ludicrous behavior has me very frustrated. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.


PS, the table I'm trying to paste is located here: Ryerson - Stock List. Go to Tubing & Pipe -> Round Mechanical Tubing -> 1" to 2". I've been selecting from before the "O" in "OD in Inches" down to a few rows down, and then holding shift and clicking at the end of the table, so I get a clean selection of the table. It pastes fine into Excel except for the fractions converting to dates.
 

Excel Facts

What does custom number format of ;;; mean?
Three semi-colons will hide the value in the cell. Although most people use white font instead.
A fraction is a formatted number or equation.
The text string is in the same format as short date and so Excel makes that assumption of dates over fractions. Notice when you have x/64's Excel records a text representation, not a value
(I hate the assumption. I want Text and if I want a different value interpretation I'll use Text-to-Columns.)
To manually input a fraction, you need to lead with a zero. ie "0 1/2"
 
Upvote 0
Some success for the OD >= 1 inch.
Took the copied range to Word. Then used Replace to remove the separator between the whole number and fraction part. Recopied the range and pasted in Excel....
Wall dimension column with mixed units-of-measure (gage & fractions) hopefully is not preferred over decimal column.
 
Upvote 0

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