Select format cells
Select "Text"
This will disable excel's autoformatting. Given the rarity that someone types "SEPT4" into excel and isn't typing a date, putting the option one level deep in a menu seems more appropriate than a top level button.
Given the rarity that someone has pasted 100 000 rows into and want them to be autoborked disabling autoborking, at least for pasted data seems appropriate enough for me ;-)
Seriously? Also for pasted series? Also when the rest of the column doesn't match?
The I-want-to-put-data-in-my-table-which-closely-resembles-an-incredibly-common-format-but-is-problematic-if-mistaken-for-that-format-oh-and-I-can-not-be-bothered-to-google-how-to-turn-off-autoformat niche is not very large. I don't work for microsoft and I don't have copies of user data, but I would be willing to bet my entire life savings that over 95% of the time someone pastes a series which appears to have mismatched data types in the columns, the series actually does have mismatched data types in the columns.
I'd rather think of 100 000 rows where some of them looks like like a date.
automatically "correcting" something that was correct based on a dumb hunch
It is really simple to remove the most embarrassing autocomplete errors on phones:
- just disable autocorrect,
- or preferably use another keyboard that just proposes fixes but leaves it to you to select the suggestion (I use SwiftKey and it does this, others probably exist too).
The same is not possible in Excel as far as I am aware:
You cannot turn of autoformatting.
The whole thing could be easily (on a ux level at least ;-) solved by introducing a single checkbox: "stop embarrassing me" with help text that says "turn off autoformatting".
Checking that box would leave values like you typed or pasted them in.
No need to select on a column basis.
Edit: It is also almost at the level of modern search engines that replace my very specific queries with generic queries about something unrelated or vaguely related.
Edit 2: it is already more than a year ago I guess since iPhones were caught changing the names of correctly spelled medications to the name of another unrelated medication. Sooner or later this incessant drive to be smarter than the user is going to cost lives I'm afraid.
When it comes to search it is already costing me many minutes lost a day, and that is just first order effects, before we get into all the things that doesn't get done because we give up on finding it.