How do I paste the appearance of a custom data-formatted in Numbers without the data format?

The result cannot be a "number" (something that can be used with math operators or math formulas as a number) because "numbers" do not have dashes in them. The result will either be text or a date&time value.

If you are doing one cell and want the result to be a date&time value,

1. Select the source cell
2. Copy
3. Double click in the destination cell (as if you are going to enter text)
4. Paste

If you want it as text,

1. Select the source cell
2. Copy
3. Select the destination cell
4. Type an apostrophe to format the destination as text
5. Paste

If more than one cell and you want the destination as text,

1. Format the destination cells as text
2. Select the source cells
3. Copy
4. Select the destination cells or just the top left one
5. Paste and Match Style

If you want them as date&time, step 6 is to format the destination cells as date&time

Hi z23a,

Use the functions LEFT, MID and RIGHT together with the concatenation operator & to insert hyphens.

Formula in C2 is LEFT(B2,4)&"-"&MID(B2,5,2)&"-"&RIGHT(B2,2)

The result is aligned left because it is Text. But Numbers treats it as a date. I tested this by adding 1 day (C2+1) in Column D and adding 30 days (C2+30) in Column E.

I also sorted Column C and it sorted correctly as if they are dates.

My Region is Australia which already allows dates to be formatted with hyphens. It may be different in your Region.

Regards,

Ian.

Also, if your goal is to affect how the number is displayed but you don't want to change the actual value in the cell to include - then have you considered just applying your existing Custom Format to other cells as needed, i.e. first select the cells and then choose the format you defined from the Data Format dropdown in the Cell tab in the inspector panel on the right?

SG

If you want to use these codes in a text editing app, simply copy/paste from Numbers to the text editing app. Or, if it is a database app or something else and the data entry field is for text, copy/paste will likely work for that as well. It will paste what you see displayed in the cell.

All spreadsheet cells have a data format. Even the "automatic" format is a data format, it is just a flexible one that tries to figure out which of the other formats fits your data. It sounds like you want the format to be text so that the cell will accept whatever characters you paste into it without interpreting it as something else (like a date) and possibly altering it to match that other format. Use one of the methods for turning them into text.

You refer to these "codes" as "numbers" but they are not numbers. Numbers are digits with other acceptable characters in the correct places (commas between every 3 digits, a decimal point, or whatever the region's number format specifies).