Excel – How to convert all the cells of an excel sheet to text

microsoft excelmicrosoft-excel-2003

Given an existing Excel 2003 document with cells of any type (integers, text, decimal, etc), how do I convert the contents of every cell to text?

And save all these changes in the same excel document?

Best Answer

On a different sheet you can enter in cell A1: 

="" & OriginalSheet!A1

Copy/Paste that for the full width and length of your original sheet. Then you can Paste Special>Values bock over the originals. That should make everything have your little green patch.

The only caveat is dates. When you apply this formula to a date field it will show the serial number of the date as text. Not the normal formatting you would have applied. To get around this, use this formula instead of the one above for date fields: 

=TEXT(A1,"mm/dd/yyyy")
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