How do I change the default cell formatting to be text?

I would like Excell to treat all of the cells as text even if they contain
numbers, all the time. Is there some way to do this? I am interested in
things like ($67,568) being changed to -$67,568 and things of this nature, I
am using test to columns and it is always trying to change the format, so I
would liek to be able to nit have to click through each column and change its
format back to text. in reality my bigger probelm is I would like to create a
document in which none of the content can be modified only the formatting.
thanks
Ian

I'm not sure if this helps, but you could use the TEXT formula to convert all
the cells to text, and then paste the results over the original cells. To
convert a number in cell A1 to text, the formula would be =TEXT(A1,"#") If
your values reside in range A1:D1000 for example, you could paste the above
formula into a neighboring range of the same size, and then "paste special
values" the results over the original range.
Hope that helps.

"mojitsu" wrote:

> I would like Excell to treat all of the cells as text even if they contain
> numbers, all the time. Is there some way to do this? I am interested in
> things like ($67,568) being changed to -$67,568 and things of this nature, I
> am using test to columns and it is always trying to change the format, so I
> would liek to be able to nit have to click through each column and change its
> format back to text. in reality my bigger probelm is I would like to create a
> document in which none of the content can be modified only the formatting.
> thanks
> Ian

"=?Utf-8?B?bW9qaXRzdQ==?=" <[email protected]> wrote in
news:[email protected]:

> I would like Excell to treat all of the cells as text even if they
> contain numbers, all the time.
>

Set it as the default format for all cells in a new workbook/sheet, save it
as template Book.xlt to your XLStart directory (where also your
personal.xls is located).


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