How to prevent numbers to get converted to dates in Excel?

Question

I\'m trying to copy paste numberic data from database to Excel. In the database the decimal separator is dot (.) and in my Excel the decimal separator is comma (,). Now when

Answer 1

Yeah, this is a real pain sometimes - my quick solution is to use cells formatted as text.

Here is how it works:

• copy your numbers with the .
• select a column or some cells
• change cell-format to text
• now paste-special (or paste-contents) as unformatted/plain text
• now replace . with ,
• now change format back to number or default

You can put this in some macro of course.

However, I think there might - or at least should be - a better solution.

But as a quickie, this works too ;)