If a cell has a numeric format applied, either programmatically or via the UI, the data entered should be treated as a number if possible.  This is Excel's behavior if the user enters an ambiguous value - for example "1/30" - Excel will convert it to date, unless the cell has been formatted as text or numeric - in which case, Excel does not perform the conversion.

I'm seeing that the kendo spreadsheet doesn't respect the numeric formatting in this manner.  If a numeric (or percentage) format is applied and the user enters "1/30" for example, the spreadsheet will convert this value to a date - 1/30/2016.

The application in which I've implemented the spreadsheet control needs to support this behavior; is there a workaround so that the cell contents are not converted?

Hello Sandra Walters,

I am afraid that there is no workaround and this is bit misleading behavior. I logged as an issue in our repository. 

Thank you for your feedback. 

Regards,
Boyan Dimitrov
Telerik

Hello Boyan Dimitrov,

Thanks for the response.   However, I see the issue has already been closed because "the same happens in Google Sheets" (by mishoo).  It does however happen in Excel.

Is Google sheets the standard then, and not Excel???

Hello Sandra,

This is an implementation detail, and Google Sheets and Excel differ in their implementations. The Kendo UI Spreadsheet does not try to replicate all Excel features, since the Excel codebase has accumulated features over 30 years and has millions of lines of code, which is not optimal for a web widget.

For the specific case, 1/30 is a computation, while 0.033 is a number. Users can input computations via formulas, and this can be serialized as a number from the server, therefore we do not find the lack of this extra code limiting to users or developers.

Regards,
Alex Gyoshev
Telerik