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I often need to do such things as enter a column of twitter handles. But if I start a cell by typing "@", excel assumes its a formula, and worse, refuses to accept a bad formula.

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usually you can use ' at the beginning of a cell to show the value as a string.

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  • Wow, this is an awesome trick. The column/cell does not even need to be formatted as text first for this to work.
    – xdumaine
    May 24, 2012 at 17:22
  • Yeah, it's a handy one, especially if you want to start with an =
    – MaddHacker
    May 24, 2012 at 17:24
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    @DragonFax -- you should accept this as the answer. The tick mark at the beginning of a cell is the universally accepted way to do this.
    – Jon Crowell
    Jun 2, 2012 at 20:37
  • would have been accepted faster but stackexchange seems to have stopped emailing me. will investigate.
    – DragonFax
    Jun 22, 2012 at 20:54
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Through experimentation, I found that I can set the whole column with a format of "Text" and that convinces Excel to accept the poorly formated "formulas". So this is a workable solution.

But I don't accept this as an elegant or proper solution, as it still assumes the input is a formula, and it acts as so (trying to sum other cells clicked, and such) until I force it to finish editing the cell. In other words, I don't trust the results of this solution.

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