Google Forms – Number Ranges Appear as Dates

google-forms

I have a Google form intended to be filled out by teachers. One of the questions is about student ages. The choices are checkboxes with age ranges, so [ ] 0 – 5, [ ] 6 – 11 and so on.

The two ranges 6 – 11 and 12 – 14 show up formatted as dates, 11-Jun and 14-Dec, in the CSV spreadsheet. The others (0 – 5, 15 – 19, and 20+) show up as text. If I format the entire column as text, I get the numbers 43262 and 43448, which are presumably day numbers.

Since the munged content is predictable, I know I can fix this manually, but I'd surely like to prevent it from happening. How can I prevent this behavior?

Edit:
Here's what the form looks like:
enter image description here

The resulting spreadsheet looks like this before formatting:
enter image description here

After formatting column B as text, it looks like this:
enter image description here

Best Answer

you can use forced formatting so instead just 6 - 11 / 12 - 14 type in:

="6 - 11"
="12 - 14"

or:

'6 - 11
'12 - 14

or:

=TEXT(; "6 - 11")
=TEXT(; "12 - 14")

or:

=T("6 - 11")
=T("12 - 14")

update:

you can try to format it as @

enter image description here

or you can fake it to still be a date but look like you need it:

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