Pop-up Menu Auto Formatting Dates

This is a quirk of Numbers. In its attempt to be smart it is often "***".

The way I make pop up menus is to list the items in a table, select that range of cells, and format as pop-up menu. You can format each item to be what you want it to be (before converting to pop up menu) and the pop up will honor that format. So, for this problem you are running into:

1. Format a column of cells as text
2. Type in your words (Jan, Feb, Mar, and so on)
3. Select all those cells and format as pop up menu. Include a blank cell in the selection if you want it to "start with blank"
4. Copy/Paste one of them to wherever you need it. Use the blank one if the pop up starts with blank.

[Edited by Moderator]

This is the easy way to make pop up menus anyway so it serves that purpose even if you aren't trying to get around this quirk.

Oh, and the word that got starred out in my post was the common antonym to "smart" that you can say anywhere, including in church (at least when talking about something inanimate), except I guess not here. I find that, itself, to be "the opposite of smart".