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Excel, and I think most Office Products, have an obnoxious habit of replacing regular ASCII characters with obscure extended characters if it can, which renders the result absolutely useless to anything else.

For example, ASCII quotes get replaced with some extended open and close pairs. The thing I'm having trouble with right now is ... is being translated to the single character 0x85. Is it too much to ask that it trust me, not pretend like it knows better what I want, and just leaves my stuff alone? I have better things to do with my time than search&replace the mess that it makes after the fact. There is nothing worse than some programs misguided attempt to make life easier, that ends up making you insane.

Please help me end the pain!

tlum
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  • Excel doesn't do smart quote replacement. Are you pasting text from another application like word? – DavidPostill Aug 05 '17 at 19:36
  • No, that's what I get for "generalizing" about obnoxious tampering and assuming that it's centrally located and controlled. But apparently obnoxiousness is NOT equal across all Office products, nor are the controlling functions centralized. The ... is coming from auto-correct, but Smart Quotes is probably some place else. That means that each bit of tampering needs to be identified, tracked down, and turned off with it's respective controls... it's not the case of one checkbox makes all your problems go away... and mixing them in a problem description is just confusing. – tlum Aug 05 '17 at 21:21

1 Answers1

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You may apply some control over these auto-corrections via the menu File → Options, Proofing, AutoCorrect options...

You have four categories under that: AutoCorrect, AutoFormat As You Type, Actions, and Math AutoCorrect.

I suppose that the main option for you is "Replace text as you type":

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Peter Mortensen
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harrymc
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  • Wow, thank you. I always figured auto-correct was dictionary based, but apparently there's a static list of misspellings and their corrections... plus I never saw ... as being something needing correction, so auto-correct wasn't the first place I looked. – tlum Aug 05 '17 at 21:13
  • I also had to deal with Smart Quotes at the system level using my Mac under System Preferences > Keyboard > Text. – Pysis Aug 06 '17 at 04:00