Excel misunderstands String or characters into dates

Post author: Yuan Liu
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Posted on 2021-09-27 Edited on 2022-05-07

Excel automatically formats characters looks like date or time.

Some IDs, such as PDB ID and gene name, contain characters looks like date. However, Excel is the most efficient tools to quickly view the dataset, especially when datasets is small (<10000 rows).

A practical way is to open a blank Excel file, import the data file, and specify fields as text.