Not so much a title as what I just screamed. Here’s the story:
I wanted to indicate two separate quantities in the same cell, under the same heading of a table. The heading was “Workstations” on a price sheet. There were 9 total workstations— 3 of one type, 6 of another. I wanted to indicate this as 3/6. The cell below would correspond with $/$. Seems like a simple request, right?
As I’m sure many of you have experienced, Excel can be a real pain when it thinks it knows what you want to type. Excel said to me, “3/6— you must have meant March-6”.
I said nay. Simple fix, right? So I right clicked, clicked “format cell”, and selected “number”. Expecting my 3/6 to return to cell D4 where I left it, Excel surprised me again. This time, its machine brain assumed I wanted to type “40608.00”. Wrong again, Robot.
Nearing wit’s end, I changed the format to “fraction” and re-entered my 3/6 in D4. This time, Excel thought I was doing a 5th grade fraction worksheet and simplified my fraction to “1/2”.
I’m usually pretty laid back, but at this point, I lost my cool and punched Excel in the face. I apologized, replaced my monitor, and tried one last time to format D4. I did what didn’t make sense to me and chose “text” as the format.
My cell finally stayed as “3/6”, but as a parting jab, Excel automatically left-aligned the cell, and made me click one more time on “right align” to get where I wanted to be.
**Tip of the Century**
If you need to write numbers as text to avoid auto-formatting, just type an apostrophe first. Example— Typing ‘3/6 will yield 3/6 as text (you’ll still have to click “right align” though).
Also, whatever numbers you type as text, will no longer be eligible for use in mathematical formulas. Example— ‘3/6 plus ‘3/6 yields 81216….not sure where they came up with that one!
Happy Spread-Sheeting.
-Bryan
