Amen to that!! Yes, "Clippy" (Excel) gets a little too enthusiastic at times, but the missing piece here is metadata. So Clippy does what Clippy can without metadata, and the results can be laughable at times.
My fix for that, _if I'm sourcing the data_, is to source it as tab-delimited (not CSV-delimited) from the clipboard into an empty sheet area twice:
With the first paste, I 'visually' correct the columns' incorrectly guessed data types, but Clippy oddly doesn't attempt to reformat the data. No worries, I just select all, hit DELETE, then do my second paste using the same starting cell as my first paste. Clippy doesn't interfere this time, and my data comes up all beautifully typed as I want it. I don't know why, but the DELETE key doesn't kill the data types for cells, and I'm glad it doesn't! Not visible, not obvious, but very useful.
Amen to that!! Yes, "Clippy" (Excel) gets a little too enthusiastic at times, but the missing piece here is metadata. So Clippy does what Clippy can without metadata, and the results can be laughable at times.
My fix for that, _if I'm sourcing the data_, is to source it as tab-delimited (not CSV-delimited) from the clipboard into an empty sheet area twice:
With the first paste, I 'visually' correct the columns' incorrectly guessed data types, but Clippy oddly doesn't attempt to reformat the data. No worries, I just select all, hit DELETE, then do my second paste using the same starting cell as my first paste. Clippy doesn't interfere this time, and my data comes up all beautifully typed as I want it. I don't know why, but the DELETE key doesn't kill the data types for cells, and I'm glad it doesn't! Not visible, not obvious, but very useful.