Formats changing to DATE without reason

[davidsosis]

I am working with several excel sheets. 50 percent of the time, when I reopen the sheet, all the cells are in DATE FORMAT. I have taken the entire workbook (12 sheets in workbook) and insured that no cells are dates. I formatted them as General or Percent. STILL, I just re-opened the workbook to make adjustments in data and found that it was back to Date Format.

Does anyone have an idea why this is happening? I've had two workbooks do this to me.

Please HELP!!!

 

[Peter_SSs]

Don't know if the problem was solved, but you are not the first to experience this.

http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/showthread.php?t=466387

 

[Andrew Poulsom]

Seems to be a common issue:

http://help.wugnet.com/office/Excel-2007-Cell-Format-Change-Bug-Warning-ftopict1143233.html

Does it only relate to shared workbooks?

 

[davidsosis]

Thank you again...

If it helps in your diognostics, this is NOT computer specific. The sheet this is happening to has shown this problem on diffrent computers/users. This problem also has happened to a second sheet twice.

It's a bugger...

Again, thanks for the assistance.

Dave

 

[Andrew Poulsom]

Is it a shared workbook?

 

[Joe4]

Take a look at the last post in the link Andrew provided and see if that fixes the issue.

 

[davidsosis]

This is "NOT" a shared workbook. I had tried to change everything back to "General", but it still happens. At least once a day the workbook reverts to "Date".

I did notice that one of the suggestions given was to change the format to "Text" insead of "General". Next time this happens I'm going to try that.

Thank you EVERYONE for your support. I will post the results as they happen.

Dave

 

[Peter_SSs]

But did you try the particular suggestion mentioned? That is

One fix is this:
Click on cell styles in the Home ribbon.
Right click on "Normal"
Click modify
Click format
Change format to general from date

 

[sulakvea]

when you see ######### instead of the actual number, does expanding the width of the cell show the actual dates? if so, what date comes up instead 20080512? is it May 12 2008?

P.S. the reason i'm asking, and it's just a very wild guess, but could it be the setup of your regional settings? i cant check it - still using XP / 2003, but who knows what goes on in 2007

 

[davidsosis]

I have just tried what Peter SSs suggested. I went to Cell Styles and checked the formating as perscribed... Low and Behold, after I clicked the format button, the style was set to "Date". I changed it to General and clicked "OK".

I don't know if this will fix the problem, but at least it's a start (lol).

As for the #####, even if I expand the cell, all I'd see is ####. I never get a number or word. If I look in the formula bar with the cell #### selected, I see the true value.

Hope the format is fixed now. I will let all of you know. Thanks for the help.

Dave

 

[scottylad2]

You putting a -in front of your dates at all? if i do that i can reproduce the ##### signs in the cell

Excel Workbook
	F	G	H
2
3
4		##################
5
Course Dates