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I have a spreadsheet where I need to use strings that contain a couple of dash/ minus ( - ) signs in cells, but it will not stop truing to recognize them as formulas! I have already formatted the cells as text cells, but any time I try to click out of the cell it outlines whatever I clicked in blue and the formatting in the cell undoes itself. Hitting Undo resets the cell to what it was before I clicked into it. This is very frustrating. I can tab or enter out of the cell without it doing this, but that's not good for my workflow. The only other answer I found was to add a ' to the beginning of each cell, but there's a ton of cells like this and they're not identical. Is there a setting I'm missing somewhere that will just tell Excel to not look for math ever in a text formatted cell? I would much rather manually format my cells than have Excel fight with me all the time (my excel work here is pretty basic, I write few enough formulas that it really wouldn't bother me at all to just manually format everything.)

Seems like most people have the exact opposite problem, which is making my issue kind of impossible to Google.

And no, I can't use different symbols, it's not my choice, I didn't write this file, it's an old shared sheet that I'm stuck with. I'm just the only one editing it, everyone else just copies from it.

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    Have you tried using an initial single quote? In other words, instead of -53, write '-53.
    – Slartibartfast
    Commented May 15, 2021 at 2:29
  • Please provide a sample of what you are entering. I've to add -10-20-30 in cell both with a ' before and without. The column is formatted as text.
    – BradR
    Commented May 15, 2021 at 11:50
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    You must format the cell as Text BEFORE entering the string.
    – Ron Rosenfeld
    Commented May 15, 2021 at 17:39

2 Answers 2

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Unfortunately there is no such setting and this behaviour cant be changed.

You can either enter data starting with the single quote or press enter before using the arrows. An extra keystroke eitherway.

Last resort is to do a search and replace all, replacing all - minus signs with another suitable delimiter eg. _ or ; or *.

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Could you please share us some sample?

If you enter dash/ minus ( - ) sign, or add a character after it，Excel would think you are entering a formula and it is subtracting.

After entering the cell, I suggest you press Enter key, then Excel will move down to the next cell. At this time, you could click other cells.

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